Seema Kushwaha, lawyer of the 2012 Delhi rape victim, known as Nirbhaya, will now fight the case of the Hathras victim. Seema tried to meet the victim’s family on Thursday, but was prevented from meeting them by the police.
“I will not leave Hathras without meeting the family. They have requested me to stand as their legal counsel but the administration is not allowing me to meet them,” she told reporters. She said that she was in touch with the victim’s brother.
Kushwaha was the family lawyer of the 23-year-old paramedical student who was gang-raped on a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012, by six people, including a juvenile in Delhi. The woman died at a Singapore hospital later.
All four convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case — Akshay Singh Thakur, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma, and Mukesh Singh — were hanged to death in March, this year.
The 19-year-old Hathras girl had succumbed to assault injuries in Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital on Tuesday, where she was brought on Monday from the Aligarh Muslim University Medical College. The government has formed a three-member SIT to probe the case and said the matter will be heard in the fast track court. All four accused in the case have been arrested.
Additional Director General (law and order) Prashant Kumar has said that the post-mortem, which was conducted by a team of doctors in Delhi, has established that the death was caused by the trauma of her neck injury and there was no confirmation of rape.
