The special court which was installed in Coimbatore in the state of Tamil Nadu to hear the cases booked under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) has, on Friday, pronounced the death penalty to 34-year-old convict Santhosh Kumar who was proven guilty in raping and murdering a seven-year-old girl in March 2019.

The final verdict was delivered by Mahila court Justice Radhika and the judicial body noted that Santhosh Kumar should be hanged to death for the brutal crime of murdering a minor girl and the verdict comes a day after the victim's mother tabled her plea in the court to seek its order to launch reinvestigation into the death based on the forensic report as the analysis from the forensic report had revealed that there were traces of DNA of another man apart from convicted Santhosh Kumar which has caused a major development in the case that the crime would have been committed by two men. 

By hearing the petition, the POCSO court directed to launch a further investigation to expose the involvement of the other accused under section 173 of CPC. In March this year, the minor girl was reportedly gone missing from her house after which the child's mother had approached the local police station the same day and registered a missing complaint and exactly one day after the complaint was filed, the cops had located the defaced body of the child close to her house after which an autopsy was performed which had revealed that she was brutally harassed and assaulted before being murdered.

After a week-long investigation about the suspects, the police detained 34-year- old Santhosh Kumar who belongs to Thondamuthur area of the city and he was working as a daily wager and he committed the crime when he was living in his grandmother's house in Pannimadai where the victim lived near to him and he allegedly abducted the girl while she was playing in front of his grandmother's house and he took her inside the house and raped multiple times before murdering her.

Along with the death penalty, the Mahila court had awarded life term imprisonment under POCSO act and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment under the grounds of section 201 for causing disappearance of evidence or disclosing false information and the Justice had ordered him to pay Rs 2000 for the charges levied against him. While he was given confessions earlier that he was the one who committed the crime, the forensic report had poured the uncertainty that the crime has the involvement of the other man who is yet to be exposed.