NEW DELHI, 22 September 2003 — Indian police will seek the death penalty for 13 men convicted of murdering an Australian missionary and his two young sons, an official said yesterday.
The men set ablaze a jeep in which Graham Staines and his sons Philip, 10, and Timothy, 8, were sleeping. The attack, in the eastern state of Orissa more than four years ago, was one of many on minority Christians blamed on Hindu fanatics.
A district court in eastern India will sentence the 13 men today. The court found them guilty last week of rioting, arson and culpable homicide amounting to murder.
Culpable homicide amounting to murder can carry the death penalty in some cases but more commonly gets life imprisonment.
Asked if he would seek the death penalty or a life term, Central Bureau of Investigation counsel K. Sudhakar told Reuters: “We are going to ask for the higher punishment.”
Christian activists said Dara Singh, one of the 13 men convicted, was linked with Hindu groups allied with India’s ruling Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The party denies any connection.
A news report yesterday said the killers were provoked by the “corruption of tribal culture” by the missionaries, who fed villagers beef and gave them brassieres and sanitary napkins.
“I did this because of the bitter relations with the Christians,” Mahendra Hembram, one of the 13 men convicted was quoted as saying by The Hindustan Times in a letter to his sister-in-law.
“After hearing so many things about the Christians, we decided to kill the Christians,” he wrote. Hembram wrote the letter from a hide-out after he fled Manoharpur, a village in eastern India’s Orissa state, where the crime took place, the paper said. He was later detained.
According to the newspaper, Hembram told his interrogators that he Dara Singh were enraged when on Christmas Day, 1998, they “watched the villagers eating beef and decided to kill Staines.” Many Hindus worship the cow and even those Hindus who eat meat tend to avoid beef.
Hembram was angered by what he saw as corruption of tribal culture “by the distribution of sanitary napkins and brassieres to women by missionaries,” the CBI official was quoted as saying.
