A Mumbai court adjourned the hearing on the Shakti Mills photojournalist gangrape case till Wednesday. The court will decide quantum of sentencing in the gangrape case. Four men were convicted by the court last week and three of them have also been found guilty of gangraping an 18-year-old telephone operator at the same Shakti Mills compound. These three common convicts in both the cases have been sentenced to life imprisonment in the telephone operator case.
The prosecution in the photojournalist case had filed an application to add Section 376 (E) against the three repeat offenders. The court had following this adjourned the sentencing till Monday.
The court convicted the five men for gangrape, criminal conspiracy, common intention, unnatural sex, criminal intimidation, wrongful restraint, assault, destruction of evidence under IPC and other relevant sections of the Information Technology Act.
A total of seven persons including two minors, were arrested in connection with the two gangrapes involving a telephone operator and a photojournalist in July-August 2013. Three of the convicts are common to both the cases. Principal sessions court judge Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi convicted Vijay Jadhav, 19, Mohammad Qasim Hafiz Shaikh alias Kasim Bengali, 21 and Mohammad Ansari, 28, in both the cases. while Siraj Khan was found guilty in the photojournalist gangrape case (on August 22) and Mohammad Ashfaque Shaikh, in the telephone operator gangrape case at the same compound on July 31 last year.
Two minors, one in each case, are being tried by the Juvenile Justice Board separately.
