New Delhi: A Delhi court on Monday convicted MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar for raping a minor in Unnao in 2017 and held the victim’s testimony as “unblemished, truthful and of sterling quality” and slammed the CBI for selectively leaking witness statements and call detail records to weaken the girl’s case.Sengar may spend the rest of his life behind bars. The court relied on the girl’s statement, considered the events post the rape where the girl’s father was murdered and her uncle was jailed and upheld the girl’s claim that she was a minor at the time of the crime, to convict Sengar under Section 376 of IPC and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.The offence carries a minimum sentence of 10 years in jail which may extend to imprisonment for life. The POCSO Act was amended in 2019 to provide for death sentence for such offences but may not apply retrospectively to Sengar as his offence dates to 2017.The court rejected Sengar’s arguments on why the incident was not reported by the victim immediately but after over two months and also not disclosed by the victim in her first statement before a magistrate.“It is explained by the girl that such facts were not disclosed by her (earlier) as she had been threatened by Sengar to keep quiet or else she and her family would not be spared…and it is established that no sooner was the incident was reported, than a vicious tirade against her uncle Mahesh and her deceased father was orchestrated by Sengar to keep Mahesh behind bars and leading to the alleged incident of beating of her father,” court said.The judgement also slammed the CBI for not assigning a woman officer to conduct the investigation as mandated by POCSO Act, for calling the victim to the CBI office for recording her successive statements “without bothering on the kind of harassment, anguish and re-victimisation that occurs to the victim of sexual assault in such a case” and filing a charge-sheet after a delay of almost a year.The court also said that the statement of the witnesses and call detail records “appear to have been selectively leaked to put a cloud over the case of the complainant” and the CBI did not examine the “huge data” retrieved from thetwo mobiles of Sengar.“It appears that somewhere investigation has not been fair to the victim of crime and her family members,” the court said.The court said Sengar’s defence tried to “demolish the character of the girl” and term the case as sham and bogus but failed to prove that a false complaint had been orchestrated against Sengar to settle old scores “…Since it is not conceivable that the victim and her mother were not oblivious or unmindful of the vulnerability of three other young girls in the family who stand to be subjected to shame, disgust and indignity in the society,” the court said.“The instant case manifests the multitudes of restrictions and taboos within which many women in the rural areas are brought up, grow and survive. It epitomises the fear ingrained in the minds of young girls in the countryside or elsewhere against reporting issues of sexual assault by powerful adults,” the court said.The court, however, acquitted his co-accused Shashi Singh, who was accused of luring the girl to Sengar’s house on June 4, 2017 where she was raped. An aide of the MLA told ET that Sengar will use this as one of the basis to challenge the verdict in High Court. He broke down in court after the verdict.