New Delhi, India - The Graham Stewart Staines case took a fresh twist on Monday with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filing a special leave petition before the Supreme Court, challenging the Orissa High Court's order which had reduced the accused Dara Singh's punishment to life imprisonment. The sessions court of Bhubaneshwar had sentenced him to capital punishment.
On May 19, the Orissa High Court aquitted 11 persons convicted by the sessions court for the gruesome murder of the Australian missionary and his two minor sons Philip (8) and Timothy (6) in January 1999.
"We have relied on criteria laid down by the Supreme Court in the Macchi Singh case and have categorised the Graham Staines case as a 'rarest of rare' cases because the motive was communal. Two small and innocent children were roasted to death along with their father, and the accused persons disregarded their pleas to let them out of the vehicle that had been torched by them," a CBI spokesperson said on Monday. "We have, therefore, pressed for re-imposition of capital punishment on Dara Singh," he added.
"The investigative agency has challenged the court's judgement on the basis of legal points which the court either did not consider or considered erroneously," the spokesperson explained. He asserted that the photographic identification of the accused persons was legally correct and conforms to the guidelines laid down by the apex court.
The CBI asserted that the high court did not consider the accused persons' confessional statements appropriately. It stressed that the evidence collected during the investigation clearly pointed to a criminal conspiracy hatched by Singh with others to eliminate missionary Staines.