2016 Ranchi engineering student rape and murder case convict awarded death sentence

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New Delhi: A Ranchi court on Saturday awarded death sentence to a man, convicted of raping and killing an engineering student in Ranchi in 2016. Special CBI Judge AK Mishra had on Friday found Raj guilty of the rape and murder of the victim, who was a fourth-semester student in a college located in the Ormanjhi area of Ranchi.

On December 16, 2016, a naked body of the girl was found at her house in Booty Basti area of Ranchi. The victim's sister had tried reaching out to her on phone and ended up calling one of her neighbours to inquire about her well-being after she didn't receive her calls. The police said that when the neighbours went to check the girl at her house, they found her body amidst smoke as everything including her bedding were on fire. 

An autopsy confirmed that the victim was raped and strangulated to death. The case triggered huge student protests in Ranchi. The CBI took over the investigation nearly 15 months after the incident, in January 2018. In March 2018, the agency registered the case and launched a hunt for the culprit with profiling of people in the area. The accused, Rahul Kumar, figured in the list of suspects as he used to live in the locality and had gone missing after the incident. 

It also emerged during the probe that the accused had a number of cases registered against him in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and was out of the jail, after jumping the bail. In June 2019, he was taken into CBI's custody from Lucknow and was brought to Ranchi, where his blood samples were collected., which matched the DNA samples collected from the victim's body. 

The CBI framed the charges against the accused on October 25. On the basis of day-to-day hearing for 16 days, the special court in Ranchi found the accused guilty of the crime and convicted him on December 20. Rahul hails from Bihar's Nalanda district.