BHUBANESHWAR, 16 September 2003 — A judge yesterday convicted 13 men in the 1999 murder of Australian Christian missionary Graham Stewart Staines and his two young sons who were burned to death by a mob.
The court in Orissa state’s capital Bhubaneshwar said the 13 would be sentenced Sept. 22 for the killing that shook India’s minority Christian community and triggered global outrage.
The 13 could face the death penalty.
The convicted included Ravindra Pal, known by the alias Dara Singh, a right-wing Hindu who allegedly led the mob that lynched Staines and his children on Jan. 23, 1999. Singh showed little reaction as Judge Mahendra Nath Pattnaik read the verdict. He told the tightly guarded courtroom that he would appeal the conviction, before being whisked away from reporters.
A 14th suspect, Aniruddha Dandapat, was acquitted for lack of evidence.
Three men charged over the murder are still at large while a youth was earlier convicted and sentenced to seven years in a juvenile correctional home.
Staines, a 57-year-old Baptist who had worked in India since 1965, was sleeping with his sons in his station wagon as he traveled between Orissa villages when he was surrounded by a mob that reportedly shouted anti-Christian slogans.
Staines and his sons Philip, eight, and Timothy, 10, were burnt alive after their escape route from the car was blocked by activists brandishing axes, according to prosecutors.
The missionary’s widow Gladys Staines continues to live in India and has publicly forgiven her husband’s killers, saying Christianity teaches against bitterness.
She has kept up her late husband’s work with lepers and is raising money to build a hospital in Orissa.
A spokesman for the Australian High Commission in New Delhi said the Canberra government “acknowledges the guilty verdict” and has been following the case closely. “This was an utterly abhorrent crime and recognized as such widely in India. We appreciate the commitment of the Indian authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice and pay tribute to Mrs. Staines, a remarkable woman who remains committed to the humanitarian work she is doing in India despite these terrible events,” the spokesman said.
Singh was arrested one year after the killings, leading to accusations that authorities had been lax in prosecuting the case. The trial has been going on since March 2001 with some 80 witnesses called to testify.
Singh, who denied charges he killed Staines, is also facing charges for the 1999 killings of a Roman Catholic priest and a Muslim trader in Orissa. He was hiding in the state’s forested Manoharpur district when he was arrested on Jan. 31, 2000.
Singh was allegedly an activist of Bajrang Dal, a right-wing Hindu movement with ideological ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who has personally condemned the missionary’s killing.
Around 10 supporters of Singh chanted slogans outside the courtroom claiming he was innocent before being taken away by police.
Right-wing Hindu groups accuse the approximately 1,000 registered Christian missionaries in India of trying to alter the country’s demographic balance.
More than 80 percent of India’s billion-plus people are Hindus, who generally do not accept converts.
Radical movements have in recent years launched efforts to “reconvert” minority Christians and Muslims to Hinduism.
After the lynching of Staines and his sons, then President K.R. Narayanan said the incident was an “aberration” of India’s “time-tested tolerance and harmony.”
The killings “belong to the world’s inventory of black deeds,” he said.
The brother Staines said he hoped the 13 people convicted yesterday would be spared the death penalty.
John Staines said he had forgiven those who killed his brother Graham and two nephews. John Staines said yesterday he was concerned a sentence of death would stir up more extremism. “There are other people who could get hurt,” he told the Australian Associated Press.
“The thing is, we have forgiven them in Christ’s name. I think that these men have to face up to what they’ve done. By the same token, I don’t want to see them put to death over it,” he said.
“Anything that man does in these things doesn’t really count for very much because God is the final judge.” Before his slaying, Graham Staines and his wife had spent more than 30 years working with leprosy patients in Orissa’s Baripada district.
