Trial in US national rape case starts

CHANDIGARH: The trial in the US national rape case of 2015 started here on Wednesday with Ludhiana auto-rickshaw driver Baldev Kumar as accused. The crime was committed in the city.


The charges were framed on August 28 but neither the survivor has recordher statement before a magistrate nor police have conducted a test identification parade of the accused. The Chandigarh district court where the trial started has allowed the UT police to do both tasks by videoconferencing through the American embassy under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). The matter of knowing the procedure of involving the embassy is pending with the Punjab and Haryana high court and the hearing is on December 14.

Another accused is on the run. During the resumed hearing in the district court on Wednesday, four prosecution witnesses recorded their statement. They included the doctors who had examined the accused and translated the medical report from French (the survivor had mailed that from France). Including the autorickshaw owner and the mechanic who replaced the threewheeler’s registration number plate, the prosecution has 26 witnesses. Defence lawyer Meenu Jajoria said the accused had been behind bars for a year and “now that the trial has begun, the truth will come out”. In April 2015, two men raped the American woman in Chandigarh. She did not return to India and police moved an application in court to record her statement and do the identification parade through videoconferencing.

Going via embassy to take time: Police

Police argued that going via the embassy will be timeconsuming. But the court directed police to do as the American embassy says and, hence, the matter went to the high court.

The US woman had arrived on a tourist visa. Scheduled to start a Europe tour after that, she left the country in less than a week of the crime, without registering a complaint. From France in August 2015, she sent an online complaint to thethen Chandigarh inspector general of police, R P Upadhaya, which led to an investigation and the filing of an FIR (first-information report) at the Sector 17 police station in February 2016.

The charge sheet says police took more than two years to arrest the accused auto-rickshaw driver. That too after a hint given by the survivor herself in her email to the police, which mentioned two digits of the partial registration number of the three-wheeler. The vehicle was traced to Vikramjeet Singh of Phase VI, Mohali.