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Bangladesh Court orders death sentence in Nusrat Jahan Rafi in a murder case.
A court in Bangladesh has upheld the death sentence of the sixteen accused in the case of the murder of a nineteen-year-old teenager who was burnt to death. The deceased, named Nusrat Jahan Rafi was a student, who had filed a sexual harassment complaint against the head teacher of the seminar which she had attended. On her refusal to withdraw the said complaint, she was set on fire by pouring kerosene over her. Apparently, the deceased was lured to the roof of the building where the seminar was taking place and she was coerced by the attackers to take back her complaint against them to the police authorities. She could not be saved as she had already suffered about eighty per cent burns and she succumbed to her burn injuries.
Interestingly, one of the accused had tried to shift the blame to the school principal for ordering the attack. Pieces of evidence suggest that the intention of the accused people were to wrongfully portray the incident as a suicide case. For this, they had tied the deceased with a scarf before the act of pouring kerosene and setting her to fire. However, their plan failed after she hurried down the stairs when only the scarf was burnt while her hands and feet were left free. Among the accused, some of them are identified as her own classmates. The case was now heard in a fast track Court within a span of sixty-two days of the alleged incident. The defence counsel had claimed that they would appeal in the High Court against the sentence.
The incident had triggered a country-wide protest, raising their voice against sexual harassment and the rarity of prosecutions in the incidents of rape and sexual assault. A progressive step that was taken up by the Bangladeshi government was to order some twenty-seven thousand schools to set up committees with an intention to stop sexual harassment at schools.
Image credits- pressfrom.info
