The Bombay high court last week admitted the appeal filed by a man convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for kidnapping, raping and killing a five-year-old girl in Nehru Nagar, Kurla in 2010. Javed Shaikh, the convict, has challenged his conviction in the case.
The five-year-old girl’s body was found in a vacant shanty at Nehru Nagar's Vatsalatai Nagar slum on June 19, 2010. The girl had gone missing on June 5, 2010.
Shaikh’s advocate Amin Solkar confirmed the news and said, “The high court has admitted the appeal and it would come up for hearing in due course.” He did not divulge much on what basis the appeal is filed and said the stand taken in the high court is the same that was taken before the trial court.
The defence taken by Shaikh, who was working with a local cable operator, was that he was on duty at the time of incident and in fact he had also gone to house of a policeman. He had examined four defence witnesses to prove that he was on duty. The witnesses examined by him included his employer also who produced receipts and cash collected by Shaikh from customers.
However, the special women’s court judge Vrushali Joshi accepted special public prosecutor Pradeep Gharat’s contention that the receipts did not have serial number or any other corroborative marks to show that they were collected by none other than Shaikh.
Shaikh was convicted for kidnapping, raping and killing a five-year-old girl living in an area he used to visit as part of his work.
The judge had also taken into consideration that the DNA report had matched.
After conviction prosecution had sought capital punishment. Even Shaikh told the court that he was innocent but if court feels that he is guilty then he should be given death penalty. However the judge gave him life sentence, observing it was not a “rarest of rare” case.
Shaikh’s arrest took place in 2010 when the Nehru Nagar area of Kurla had been rocked by the rape and murder of several small girls but he was charged for only one murder.
