NEW DELHI: “It cannot be ignored that the victim is a Muslim and as per Muslim law she attained the age of puberty at the age of 14 years and she got married after attaining the age of puberty,” a court said and acquitted the man accused of raping her.

On November 29, 2013, the girl’s father lodged a missing complaint with the police saying he suspected that his daughter, aged a little over 17 years, had been kidnapped by the accused, who was a resident of the same locality.

The contradiction before the court of Additional Sessions Judge Amit Kumar was that on December 6, 2013 the girl, along with the accused, went to a police station and showed photos of their marriage. Her date of birth was found to be July 30, 1996 and therefore she was a minor. She told police that she willingly went to Jammu with the accused and got married to him. She also refused to undergo medical tests. She was then sent to a shelter home for girls.

On April 21, 2014, however, a totally contrary complaint was received by the police when the girl claimed she was “abducted, raped and poisoned”. She claimed that the accused used a sedative-laced handkerchief to abduct her, then forcefully confined her in Jammu at his aunt’s house to rape her. She also claimed that the wedding pictures were clicked by the accused to misdirect the police.

“The accused kept me there for three days and raped me. I was in pain at that time. I requested the accused and his aunt to take me back to my parental home but they threatened to kill me,” her statement said.

The accused, on the other hand, said, “he was falsely implicated in the case at the instance of the girl’s parents as he was from a different religion”.

The court, however, opined that though she was a minor, she had “attained the age of discretion”. “The victim admittedly did not raise any alarm in the entire journey from Delhi to Jammu and from Jammu to Delhi, which shows that she went to Jammu of her own will and was neither forced nor enticed nor she was made unconscious by the accused,” the court observed. Calling her an “unreliable witness”, the court said she made these allegations after more than four months in April, 2014.

