KOLKATA: The Calcutta High Court has released a Bangladeshi national who was jailed for 21 years for murder after it was found that he was a minor at the time of the crime. Another murderer from Bengal’s Birbhum district, who had been imprisoned for 14 years in a separate case, was released on similar grounds.A bench of Justices Rajasekhar Mantha and Rai Chattopadhyay on Thursday said that under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, a minor cannot be jailed for more than seven years. The court directed the government to deport the Bangladeshi national. A judge ordered the two men to be released from custody after their inflexible test reports showed they were underage at the time of the murders.Bangladeshi national aged 16 at time of crime: ossification testLawyers for the Bangladeshi national said he was born on January 1, 1990 and was a “child in conflict with the law” at the time of the crime. On February 8, 2005, he and two others hacked to death a man in Basirhat, near the India-Bangladesh border. Although his co-accused died while the case was pending, he was convicted in 2005 and jailed. In 2016, he moved to HC. On April 11, 2022, he moved an appeal before the Divisional Judge, who ruled that the JJ Act allows a convict to raise a juvenile plea even at the appeal stage. HC ordered ossification test. Report submittedThe Additional District and Sessions Judge said that as per the recent ossification test, the convict was about 36 years old. Based on this, it was determined that he was around 16 years old when he committed the crime.
