Kerala rapist-murderer was out on bail in Delhi Pocso case

Asafak Alam, the 29-year-old man accused of raping and murdering a five-year-old girl in Kerala’s Ernakulam district last week was out on bail in a Pocso Act case dating back to 2018 in Delhi, a top police officer said on Tuesday.

“A case was registered against him in 2018 at the Ghazipur police station in Delhi under sections 12 of the Pocso Act and 354, 354A of the IPC. He was an undertrial prisoner in the case, spent a month in jail and later got out on bail. We got the information about that case when we matched fingerprints in the NCRB database. We are investigating if there are more cases registered against him,” Ernakulam Rural SP Vivek Kumar told reporters.

While cases under Pocso are expected to be tried under a year according to the law, reality is different. A study by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy analysing judicial data across 10 years (2012-21) and 400,000 cases in 28 states and Union Territories shows that the proportion of Pocso cases that takes more than three years to be disposed of is increasing year-on-year, and Delhi has the highest average case length among the states studied (three years and six months). It also found that in a typical Pocso trial, over six months are spent at the evidence stage alone.