A Jammu court on Tuesday ordered the police to register an FIR against the members of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) which probed the Kathua rape and murder case.

In a case that had triggered a massive outrage across the country, an 8-year-old girl was abducted and gang-raped for several days before being killed in January 2018. A special court in Punjab's Pathankot had convicted six people in the case, sentencing three to life and the rest to five years in prison.

The seventh accused, Vishal Jangotra, the son of the main culprit Sanjhi Ram was acquitted by the court, giving him the 'benefit of doubt'

Also read 3 of 6 guilty in Kathua rape & murder sentenced to life

Now in a turn of events, a Jammu court has ordered the police to register an FIR against the probe team members for allegedly fabricating evidence to frame Jangotra, his lawyer Ankur Sharma told Zee News.

Sharma said that the court examined all the evidence provided by him and then ordered the police to register an FIR against all the officers of the SIT under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IP.

The court has ordered the Jammu SSP to register the FIR by November 7, 2019.

Earlier this year on June 10, six people were convicted of the brutal rape and murder of the eight-year-old child in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua.

Sanjhi Ram, the caretaker of the village temple where the child was held captive and assaulted, his friend Pravesh Kumar and special police officer (SPO) Deepak Khajuria have been sentenced to life imprisonment for criminal conspiracy, murder, gang rape and destruction of evidence.

SPO Surender Verma, head constable Tilak Raj and sub-inspector Anand Dutta have been sentenced to five years in jail for destroying evidence.

The court had acquitted Vishal Jangotra, giving him the 'benefit of doubt', based on Zee News reports (April 30, 2018 and May 2, 2018). Zee News had earlier accessed CCTV footage from an ATM in UP's Muzzafarnagar showing Vishal withdrawing cash during the time investigative officers claimed he was in Kathua.

As per the charge sheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir police, the girl, belonging to a nomadic Muslim tribe, was abducted when she was grazing her family's ponies at the Himalayan foothills, on January 10, 2018.

The child was drugged and held at a temple in a village in Kathua district for almost four days, and sexually assaulted repeatedly before being bludgeoned to death.

The day-to-day trial commenced in June last year at the district and sessions court in Pathankot in Punjab, 30 km from Kathua, after the Supreme Court shifted the case out of Jammu and Kashmir.