Drama unfolded outside Patiala House Court on Thursday as wife of one of the convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case started beating herself and threatened to kill herself.
Punit Devi, wife of Akshay Singh – one of the convicts, was reportedly sitting since the morning with a child beside her. She appeared to have a nervous breakdown and fainted.
After she regained consciousness, she started beating herself with slipper, saying, “I don’t want to live. I will kill myself.”
The woman has filed a divorce petition in local court in Bihar’s Aurangabad yesterday contending her husband to be innocent and that she wants divorce before he was hanged.
“My husband is innocent. I want to be legally divorced before he is hanged,” she said in her petition.
Yesterday, Punita’s lawyer Mukesh Kumar Singh while talking to the media in Aurangabad, said, “My client (Akshay Kumar Singh’s wife Punita Singh) has a right to seek divorce from her husband. That is why I have filed a plea in the family court. She has the right to seek divorce under Section 13(2)(II) of Hindu Marriage Act which says a woman can seek divorce if the husband has, since the solemnisation of the marriage, been guilty of rape, sodomy or bestiality.”
The Patiala House Court has dismissed all petitions of the 2012 Delhi gangrape convicts — Mukesh Kumar Singh, Vinay Kumar Sharma and Pawan Kumar Gupta — seeking a stay on execution.
The convicts took turns to use their legal remedies in order to stretch the execution process. Now, they are left with no legal remedies making the tomorrow’s date final for their execution.
The 23-year-old woman, who came to be known as Nirbhaya, was gang-raped and assaulted on December 16, 2012, in a moving bus which led to her death. All the six accused were arrested and charged with sexual assault and murder. One of the accused was a minor and appeared before a juvenile justice court, while another accused, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail days after the trial began in the case.