By Sujit Bisoyi
One of the convicts in the gruesome murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two minor sons in 1999 was released from Odisha’s Keonjhar jail Wednesday after 25 years of incarceration on the grounds of “good behaviour”, said officials.
Mahendra Hembram, now 51, was convicted along with Rabindra Pal Singh, also known as Dara Singh, in the heinous crime that drew global outrage 26 years ago. According to officials, Hembram was arrested on December 9, 1999, and Singh on January 31, 2000, in a forest.
After being released from jail, Hembram claimed he was falsely implicated in the case as he was opposing religious conversion and cow slaughter.
On March 19, the Supreme Court asked the Odisha Government to take a decision on the plea for premature release of Singh, who is serving a life sentence, in a separate jail in Keonjhar. Officials said the state government would take a call on Singh’s release in the next few weeks.
According to officials, Hembram’s release was in accordance with the recommendations of the Odisha State Sentence Review Board based on the guidelines of the premature release policy. Besides Hembram, 30 other convicts were also released from various prisons in different cases.
Staines and his two minor sons — Timothy, 6, and Philip, 10 — were burnt alive by a mob while they slept inside a jeep in the Manoharpur village of the Keonjhar district on the night of January 21, 1999. The attack was linked to tension over alleged religious conversion.
As many as 51 people were arrested in connection with the crime between 1999 and 2000, and 37 of them were acquitted within three years. On September 22, 2003, a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Bhubaneswar awarded a death sentence to Singh and life imprisonment to 12 others in the murder case. One more accused, a juvenile at the time of the crime, was tried in a juvenile court.
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.