New Delhi:
S Jonathan Prasad lived a nightmare 11 years after the rotten body of his daughter Esther Anuhya of 23 years was found on a Mumbai road. Esther, Tata Consultancy Services engineer (TCS), had just returned from the holidays in her hometown, Vijayawada, when she was brutally raped and killed.
Prasad, crushed by the tragedy, found some consolation when a Mumbai court condemned Chandrabhan Sanap for the horrible crime and sentenced him to death in 2015. A decade later, the wounds of the old man have been reopened after the Supreme Court fired to Sanap yesterday. And this time, Mr. Prasad has no strength to continue fighting.
A murder of chilling rape
Esther was at his home in Vijayawada for Christmas and New Year’s Eve in the winter of 2013. On January 5, he returned to Mumbai after a two -week break and was last seen leaving the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus station. When her family could not contact her, they filed a missing complaint and began to look for her in Mumbai. On January 16, a decomposed body was recovered in Kanjurmarg and identified itself as Esther’s. “We were looking for my daughter after she disappeared. Finally, after 10 days, her body was recovered. No father should face the type of trauma I have faced,” Prasad told NDTV before.
There were no eyewitnesses and the only track that the police had was images of a CCTV camera at the train station. The images showed a man with a mustache carrying Esther’s bag and walked with her. A goalkeeper at the station identified him as Sanap. He was arrested in Nashik on March 3 and accused of raping and killing Esther.
What the police said
The case was largely based on circumstantial evidence. According to the police, Sanap pretended to be a taxi driver when he saw Esther at the winter morning station. He offered to take her to the southern hostel of Mumbai, where she stayed. But when he left the station, Esther saw Sanap did not have a taxi, but a bicycle. Police said Sanap somehow managed to convince Esther to sit down.
Along the way, he stopped on a service road on the Eastern Express highway, near Kanjurmarg, under the pretext that the bicycle had run out of gas. According to the police, he dragged Esther to the nearby bushes and tried to violate her. When she resisted, he hit her head on a stone many times and strangled her with her Dupatta. Then, Sanap tried to burn Esther’s body on the thick shrubs and escaped with her suitcase, which had her laptop and other articles.
Conviction and acquittal
In October 2015, a Mumbai court condemned Sanap for the rape and murder of Esther and sentenced him to death. Granting the sentence, the special judge Vrushali Joshi said it was a weird case of the time and described for the death penalty. “The case falls into the rare of rare category, therefore, the defendant receives the death sentence. He must be hung by his neck until he is dead,” said the judge. Subsequently, the Superior Court of Bombay confirmed the death penalty. The Superior Court said that such a person would continue to be a threat to society and that the crime justified the death penalty.
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the evidence of the Prosecutor’s Office was inadequate to maintain the conviction. The facts of the case, he said, force the Court to conclude that “there are open holes in the history of the Prosecutor’s Office that leads to the irresistible conclusion that there is something more than is with the eye in this case.” While the old adage, witness can lie but not the circumstances, can be correct, however, the circumstances adduced, as this Court maintains, they must be completely established. There is a legal distinction between ‘can be tested’ and ‘must be or should be tested’ as sustained by this court. The circumstances on which they were based when they join do not lead to the only hypothesis of the defendant’s fault and we do not find that the chain is so complete that it should not leave any reasonable land for the conclusion consisting with the innocence of the accused “, the bank Judge Br Gavai, Judge Prashant Kumar Mishra and Judge KV Viswanathan said.
“I leave it to God”
In his home in Machilipatnam, Prasad said he had heard about the order of the Supreme Court, but that he could not do anything about it. “What can we do? We weren’t aware of what was happening. We don’t know that he (Sanap) approached the Supreme Court. But what will we do? I leave it to God and whatever happens, I will not get My return daughter, “PTI told the news agency.
The old man said the death penalty had given him a closure. “We appreciate that justice has been done. Now that has changed completely. I don’t know the reasons. Again, I remember my sad days 10 years ago, how I suffered in Mumbai,” he said. Prasad said the police had collected broad evidence and arrested the right person.
When asked if the case would continue and present a request for review in the Superior Court, he replied: “No sir, I can’t do that. The problem is that I am more than 70 years old. It is very difficult for me to move from my place I am a retired man and my wife is not right, she is diabetic.