Court to reimpose the death penalty on a Hindu militant who was found guilty of burning alive Australian Missionary Graham Staines and his two small sons six years ago, BosNewsLife learned Wednesday August 31.
In remarks obtained by the BosNewsLife Orissa Bureau, the CBI said it had asked the Supreme Court to overturn an order by the Orissa High Court to reduce capital punishment to life imprisonment for the militant, Dara Singh.
The CBI said the death penalty was justified as this was the "rarest of the rare case" because "the motive was communal [and] two small children were killed…The killing was done by roasting them alive and the accused persons disregarded their pleas to come out of the vehicle," CBI sources said.
Staines, who ran a leprosy home at Baripada in Mayurbhanj district, and his two minor sons Philip (10) and Timothy (6) were asleep in their station wagon at Manoharpur village on the night of January 22, 1999, when a crowd surrounded them and set the vehicle ablaze killing all three.
LOWER COURT
Initially a lower court had sentenced Dara Singh, whose real name is Rabindra Pal Singh, to death and 12 others to life imprisonment. But the Orissa High Court on May 19 upheld the life sentence for Dara Singh and another militant, Mahendra Hembram, and acquitted 11 others.
However the CBI said it would challenge that judgment based "on legal points" the High Court allegedly did not consider. Church groups also protested the ruling, saying it could encourage Hindu militants to carry out more attacks against the Christian minority in Orissa, one of India’s poorest states, and other regions of the country.
At least two native missionaries were already killed in India in recent months, police and human rights watchers say. Christians comprise just over two percent of India’s mainly Hindu population of nearly 1.1 billion people, according to estimates. (Satya Sundar Mishra is BosNewsLife India Reporter based in Orissa. Mishra is a Development Journalist of Orissa working on social and religious issues that are not yet on the radar screen of media and politicians. He has been working for a variety of key publications. He can be reached via e-mail satya_mishra11@rediffmail.com ).
