Delhi gang-rape: all four men found guilty
Judge Yogesh Khanna delivered the judgment this morning shortly after noon local time at the district court of Saket in south Delhi. The men will be sentenced on Wednesday.
The men are likely to face death by hanging, though life imprisonment is a possibility. Their lawyers said yesterday they would appeal.
The trial of the men, aged between 19 and 34, started in January. One defendant, a bus driver, hanged himself in prison on March . The oldest of the six men accused of the attack on the 23-year-old physiotherapy student, he was alleged by police to have been the ringleader. The youngest among the alleged attackers, who was 17 at the time of the assault, was tried separately and was last month sentenced to three years in a juvenile reform home — the maximum possible punishment under Indian law.
The incident, which took place on a Sunday night in Delhi in December 2012, provoked outrage in India with protests across the country . It also led to an unprecedented national discussion about sexual violence and calls for widespread changes in cultural attitudes and policing, and legal reform. The international imaged of the country was damaged, with numbers of women tourists dropping significantly.
The victim of the attack cannot be named under Indian law but her father, Badrinath Singh, told the Guardian he wanted the case to set an example to other women in India , where there has been a wave of sexual violence in recent years.
'I want other girls and women to know how brave my daughter was so her sacrifice does not go ashamed, ' Singh, 48, said shortly before the verdict.
Since the attack laws have been tightened and pledges made to improve the investigation and processing of sexual violence cases.
All the men denied charges of rape, murder and destroying evidence. Two said they had been to listen to a music concert in a park on the night of the attack. One said he was driving the bus in which the assault took place and did not take therefore directly take part in the assault. A fourth, a 26-year-old drifter, said he had left Delhi for his village.
Police have said the juvenile convicted last month was the most violent of the attackers of the girl.
The prosecution case relied on testimony from 85 witnesses, a statement given by the victim before she died, DNA samples, dental records that matched the teeth of some of the men with bite marks on the victim's body and the evidence of her male friend, who was also badly beaten in the attack.
The victim's friend described how the couple were attacked after boarding the bus on the way home from an evening movie at an upscale shopping mall. The attackers beat the man and raped the woman, police and doctors told the court.
The victims were eventually dumped on a roadside layby on the outskirts of Delhi, and the woman died two weeks later in a Singapore hospital . Her ashes were later scattered in the Ganges river, near her ancestral village in rural India.
The men were also found guilty of robbing another man earlier in the evening of the incident.
Gang-rapes, acid attacks and other acts of violence to women continue to be reported every day across India. In one recent incident a photojournalist was raped repeatedly by a group of men in a disused building in the commercial capital Mumbai . The men have since been arrested. The victim of the attack was widely praised for her courage in complaining to police and identifying her attackers.
Rape victims in India often prefer to remain silent rather than risk social ostracism, and sexual harrassment remains a daily reality for Indian women.
It is hoped fast-track courts such as the one where this trial was held will help improve a poor conviction rate. Many families of victims pressure their relatives who have been assaulted not to press charges, police often refuse to file cases for those who do, witnesses are systematically intimidated and courts rarely deliver swift justice in the few cases that are filed. Indian courts had a backlog of 33m cases as of 2011.
