The rape of a child is a “monstrous burial of her dignity in darkness”, a court in Maharashtra’s Nashik observed while holding that showing leniency to the killer of a four-year-old girl would undermine public confidence in justice.
A fast-track court had on Friday sentenced Vijay Sanjay Khairnar to death for raping and killing a four-year-old girl late last year, terming the gruesome crime as “rarest of the rare”.
In a detailed order, Additional Sessions Judge KG Paldewar held that the coldness with which the victim’s body was dumped shocked society’s collective conscience, ruling that sympathy in any form would be misplaced in such a diabolic crime. “There is no justification to sentence the accused to life imprisonment for the rest of his life. On November 16, 2025, the victim was playing with other children outside her house when the accused, Khairnar, a welding and furniture worker, lured her away with chocolates. Khairnar was convicted under sections 137(2) (kidnapping), 64, 64(2)(i), 65(2), 66 (rape causing death), 103(1) (murder), and 238(a) (causing disappearance of evidence) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, as well as Sections 4 and 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
The accused may not be a hardened criminal, but the cruel manner in which the present crime was committed and the coldness with which the body of the victim was thrown shocked the collective conscience of the society,” it said. He then raped, bludgeoned and throttled her to death using a kardora (a thin thread), and dumped her half-naked body inside a locked mobile tower compound next to his house in a village in Malegaon taluka of Nashik district, according to the prosecution.
