BHOPAL: A 41-year-old convicted child rapist, who was acquitted in a second case of child rape after being sentenced to death, has been arrested for the brutal rape of an 11-year-old girl who died on February 7 due to injuries sustained in the assault in Madhya Pradesh’s Rajgarh district, police said on Wednesday.
Police said this is the third rape accusation that the accused, Ramesh Khati, faces in 22 years. The accused, a truck cleaner, was tracked down by police officers from the Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan border.
Rajgarh superintendent of police (SP) Aditya Mishra said investigators drew up a list of 419 suspects when it started the probe into the rape of the little girl on February 1, and started eliminating people on the basis of its investigation and CCTV footage from scores of cameras.
Once officers were able to identify Khati, a police team was sent to his house in Shajapur district less than 100km from Rajgarh. His younger daughter told the police that he had tried to assault her too in the past, the SP said.
According to his track record pieced by investigators, Khati was arrested for the rape of a 5-year-old girl in 2003 and was sentenced to rigorous punishment by the Shajapur district court for 10 years, the maximum punishment for rape in the penal code at the time.
Soon after he was freed in 2013, he was arrested again for the rape of an 8-year-old girl in Ashta (Sehore) in January 2014. The trial court sentenced him to death but the verdict was overturned by a two-judge bench of the Madhya Pradesh high court in March 2016 which held that the prosecution had failed to prove his guilt. A petition filed by the state government against the high court verdict is pending before the Supreme Court.
Mishra said Khati was spotted in CCTV footage wearing a red shawl and sports shoes at the Narsinghgarh bus stand. A few minutes before the rape, the same person was seen assaulting a woman with mental illness and running towards the girl’s house near a forested area. Police checked all the CCTV footage from Shajapur to Narsinghgarh, Rajgarh and identified Ramesh Khati.
After his arrest, Khati allegedly told the police that he fled Shajapur because he had lost money in gambling and reached Rajgarh. According to the police, Khati saw the girl, sleeping with her aunt and grandmother, and that he took her to a nearby forested area where he is alleged to have repeatedly raped her on February 1 and 2. He abandoned her in the forest and fled to Jaipur in a bus, police said.
“This time, we are taking care of every piece of evidence to ensure the maximum punishment to him,” he added.
The victim’s grandmother said they weren’t sure what to do when the little girl was raped. “We were hesitant to file a complaint to police as we were not aware of the law. But now we are happy that the accused has been arrested.”