A special court in Tumakuru district in Karnataka has handed out an 11-years of rigorous imprisonment verdict and a fine of Rs 30,000 on a Madarsa teacher in a 2015 case, in which the court held the Maulana guilty of sodomising and threatening a 13-year-old minor boy.
The special court judge N Krishnaiah ordered the district legal services authority to pay Rs 5 lakh to the boy as compensation.
The Madarsa teacher, identified as Mufti Musharaf, a resident of Uttar Pradesh, was teaching at a madrassa near Amalapur in Karnataka’s Tumakuru in 2015 when the incident transpired. The victim, who was 13-years-old then, was a student in the same Madarsa where Mufti Musharaf taught. The teacher perpetrated the heinous crime on April 17, 2015, however, the incident came to the fore only two days later when the victim’s mother went to see him at the Madarsa.
Horrified by what had transpired with him, the boy broke down seeing his mother. On being coerced the son narrated his harrowing ordeal to his mother, following which the latter lodged a complaint against Mufti Musharaf with Karnataka police.
Subsequently, the police registered a case against the Maulana under sections 377 (unnatural sex) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code and arrested him.
Eleven eyewitnesses testified against the Madarsa teacher during his trial in the Karnataka court. Moreover, the statements of the minor boy and his mother proved extremely crucial in proving the Madarsa teacher guilty, said special public prosecutor GV Gayathri.
Revealing what transpired on April 17, 2015, GV Gayathri said that Mufti Musharaf asked the minor boy to help him book a train ticket to his native place in Uttar Pradesh. He urged the victim to accompany him to the railway station as he was not conversant with the local language- Kannada. He told the boy that he would need his help in language translation. The boy agreed to go along with the teacher.
Upon arriving at the railway station, Musharaf cooked up a story to trap the victim. He told the boy that his motorbike had run out of petrol so they would have to spend the night in some nearby hotel. The boy, who was oblivious to the Maulana’s maleficent plans, did what he was asked to.
The special prosecutor was quoted by TOI as saying: “In the hotel’s register, he [Musharaf] had mentioned his name as well as that of the boy. After committing the crime, Musharaf took the boy on his bike the next morning and dropped him back at the madrassa. He returned to the lodge and vacated the room. The hotel ledger mentioned there were two persons; a man and a boy while entering the room, and only the man was present while vacating it.”
Gayathri further confirmed that after the incident came to the fore and a police complaint was filed, both the perpetrator and the victim were taken for medical tests. The medical reports confirmed that the child was sodomised.
