Temple priest jailed for 20 years for raping his minor relative

Kota (Raj) A priest of a popular temple here was sentenced to 20 years in jail by a special court for raping a 14-year-old sister of his daughter-in-law for over a year.

Special Judge Dhirendra Singh Rajawat of the special court set up under the POCSO Act also imposed a fine of Rs 75,000 on the 55-year-old convict and stipulated that the failure in paying the fine would follow an additional jail term.

The court convicted the priest despite two key prosecution witnesses -- the priest’s son and his wife -- turning hostile, Kota district public prosecutor Vijay Kachawa said.

The judge found the man guilty of rape and sexual exploitation of the minor girl on the deposition by 15 other witnesses and the strength of over 25 pieces of documentary evidence, including the girl’s medical report, he added.

The case against the priest was lodged at the Kaithunipole police station in the city on a complaint by the Kota Child Welfare Committee, which came to know of the girl’s plight from her school teacher.

Finding the girl’s generally withdrawn and glum, her school teachers talked to her sympathetically and made her reveal her woes to them, Kachawa said.

During the trial, though the victim’s sister and her husband turned hostile, the girl narrated her woes to the court as to how she had to sleep in a room in which her sister’s mother-in-law and father-in-law slept.

Though the priest slept on a cot and she slept on the floor with his wife in the room, the 55-year-old man regularly exploited her sexually during the night for the entire year.

The victim belonged to a village in Madhya Pradesh where her parent lived in penury and that’s why the girl had come to stay with her sister in Rajasthan, the prosecution counsel said.