MUMBAI: Nine years on, the Bombay High Court has recently acquitted the watchman of a municipal corporation school in Kopri, who was allegedly accused of raping two girl students and showing obscene videos to a boy student of the school, giving him the benefit of doubt. A single-judge bench of justice Sarang Kotwal was determining an appeal by the watchman against his conviction in September 2023 by a Thane court, on the grounds that he had been falsely implicated in the case.
The watchman was arrested in August 2018 after the Kopri police filed an FIR against him based on statements from the Kopri school’s students. He had allegedly abducted them from the school premises and taken them to his room, where he raped them. According to the complaint, the watchman found the girls alone in a school’s stairwell. He allegedly gagged them and dragged them to his room close by, where he showed them obscene images and videos before raping them. The girls, then aged 10, claimed that they managed to escape after hitting the watchman on his head with an iron pipe. The FIR also alleged that the watchman had similarly abducted a boy student and made him watch obscene videos.
However, the watchman claimed before the high court that he had been falsely implicated in the matter and alleged that the police did not properly investigate the matter. According to the defence, even though the school had installed CCTV cameras, the police failed to collect any footage. On the contrary, he pointed out, the police claimed that there were no cameras on the school premises.
The high court noted that there was evidence to show that his room had a window, and shouts coming from there would have been quite audible to the outside world. “It becomes very difficult to believe that such an incident would have taken place without anyone noticing it at all,” the court said.
The court further noted that the conduct of the victims after the incident showed that they had attended the school as they usually did on any other normal day. “They had not complained either to their teachers or even to their friends. They had not even told their parents about it. It is only on the next day that they had told their parents, and then, after that, on the next day thereafter, they had gone to meet the principal and the other teachers,” the court observed.
The court further noted that the date when the incident with the boy victim took place was not clear from the prosecution’s evidence – whether it was before or after the alleged rape of the two girls.
In an order passed on July 25, which was recently made available, the high court set aside the watchman’s conviction.