From Our Correspondent
Agartala: In a significant judgment, a division bench of Gauhati High Court has upheld the death sentence to prime accused of Jarulbachi massacre Ashok Debbarma alias Achak.
After a long hearing, the division bench comprising Justice AK Answari and NC Das passed the verdict on Wednesday. This is the first time that a death sentence of a militant is awarded by District and Sessions judge, which was upheld by the higher court in recent past.
On the fateful night of February 11, 1997, insurgents of NLFT stormed into the village- Jarulbachi, 18 km from the state capital and sprayed indiscriminate firing at villagers.
Thirteen villagers including children and old-aged were killed in the attack while six more were injured in the attack. Around 50 dwelling huts were gutted by the militants.
Shocked by the incident, the state government had ordered CID probe into the massacre.
After conducting an in-depth investigation, the CID had submitted charge-sheet against 16 accused persons.
During investigation, the CID sleuths had arrested five accused persons including Ashok Debbarma.
After conducting hearing, the District and Sessions Judge, Subash Bhattacharjee pronounced sentence to death to the prime accused.
Of the five arrested militants, three had been exonerated by the additional district sessions court for lack of evidence while another fled from police custody during the trial.
The police official said that the main accused Ashok Debbarma challenged the Nov 10, 2005 verdict of the additional district sessions court before the division bench of the Gauhati High Court, which after a long trial pronounced the verdict of upholding the lower court’s judgement.
However, the convicted appealed before the court seeking leniency.
However, the division bench after studying the case upheld the verdict of lower court branding it rarest of rare case. In fact, the Jarulbachi massacre spared a wide spread violence across the state.
At one point of time, the state government had to impose Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) to put a plug on the ethnic violence.
Defence counsel Saumek Deb said they were yet to decide whether to appeal before the Supreme Court against the high court order. (With inputs from IANS)
