The West Bengal Legislative Assembly unanimously passed the ‘Aparajita Woman and Child Bill (West Bengal Criminal Laws and Amendment) 2024’, providing for a mandatory death penalty for the crime of rape and murder, on Tuesday.
India said it was exploring all legal options and would take up the verdict with the authorities concerned.
"I want Atiq's empire to end, I don't want him to be alive. I urge the court to give him a death sentence," Umesh Pal's widow Jaya Pal said.
"The whole family is horrified by Nikki's murder and there is silence in the streets of Khedi village of Jhajjar. I urge PM Modi to hang the killer of the daughter," Nikki's uncle Praveen Yadav said.
A Lucknow-based special court of NIA-ATS held Ahmad Murtaza Abbasi guilty on Friday last and pronounced the quantum of punishment on Monday.
The convicts, Asif (34) and Akil (33), had committed the crime on 21 August in 2014 at a village under Tirtol police station of the coastal district of Jagatsinghpur.
The government, though, estimates the number of deaths at “only” 6,000 who died in the course of over 200,000 anti-illegal drug operations as of May this year.
Rocked by nearly 1,000 incidents of rape between January and September, a fifth of them gang rapes, the country’s Cabinet this week approved the death penalty for rapists.
The approval comes in the wake of protests staged by different organisations at Dhaka's Shahbagh square and other parts of the country against sexual assaults on a woman in Noakhali and the rape of another woman in Sylhet's MC College.
The death penalty has been eliminated for those convicted of crimes committed while they were minors, Human Rights Commission president Awwad Alawwad said in a statement, citing a royal decree.
