A special court designated under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act on Saturday acquitted a 22-year-old plumber from Dharavi in a sexual assault case of 2017 in which he was accused of subjecting a two-year-old infant, his neighbour, to unnatural intercourse.
The man who was living with other bachelors opposite the child’s family, had spent three months in jail after his arrest in the case in September 2017. The court said in its judgment that the medical report clearly mentioned there was no external injury on the body of the child and that the report does not support the prosecution case as per which the infant was bleeding from his anus. It said the complaint is lodged only on suspicions and at the behest of surrounding people who forced the mother to accompany them to the police station along with a social worker.
“It is crystal clear that the accused has not committed any such act of sexual offence on the two-year-old minor child,” it said.
The child, being an infant, could not depose before the court. The child’s mother had gone back on her statement before the police in her testimony before the court. She had not stuck to her version in her statement recorded under Sec. 164 of the CrPC before a magistrate in 2017 either. It was on the basis of her resiling from her case before the magistrate as well as the medical report that the man had secured bail then.
In court, the mother had deposed that she had heard her son crying and found both her sons, one aged two years and another a year older, near the door of the accused. She had taken them back home, but said she had not noticed anything wrong. She said the people from the chawl gathered and informed her that something wrong took place with her son. She deposed that a social worker insisted on her to file the complaint, or she would not have done it.