A 53-year-old owner of a placement agency, accused of raping a girl looking for a job, has been let off with a court here finding her testimony untrustworthy.
Additional Sessions Judge Yogesh Khanna acquitted Bihar native and placement agency owner M P Singh of rape charges after it emerged that there was some monetary dispute between the two parties.
“The deposition of prosecutrix does not appear to be convincing, trustworthy and as admitted by the prosecutrix herself, there were some dues pending against the accused and she visited the office of the accused due to the money dispute,” the court said.
The prosecution case was that the alleged victim visited Singh’s office on July 27, 2008 and told him that she was looking for a job in Delhi.
Singh took her to his hostel, where he used to house job-aspirants, and offered her a cold-drink laced with alcohol, said the police adding after taking the drink, she got intoxicated and went to sleep and Singh raped her in her sleep.
Another girl who too had met Singh for a job, however, deposed as a defence witness and testified that she along with her aunt had come to Delhi in search of work on July 26, 2008. She said there were eight other job aspirant girls and some boys staying in the hostel maintained by the accused.
The girl told the court that she stayed at the hostel till July 30, 2008 and no incident of rape ever took place during her stay there and also that the accused never came to the hostel while she was there.
During her cross-examination, the victim had told the court that she had worked earlier also in Singh’s office but he did not pay her following which she had left his office.
She also went on to say that there were other girls in the hostel and Singh had treated all of them with cold-drinks.
The court noted that “while in her complaint to the police, the girl was silent about presence of other girls in the hostel, in the court she deposed that she found many girls in the hostel of the accused and that he gave alcohol-laced drinks to all the girls. This, in fact, is a material contradiction which goes against the prosecution.”
The court noted that a combined study of the deposition of the prosecutrix and the defence witness reveals that there were many girls and boys staying in the hostel on the day of the alleged incident and “thus the allegation that the accused, an aged man, had committed rape in presence of so many girls appears to be non-plausible.”