Agencies/New Delhi

A court yesterday sentenced three men to death for abducting and raping a 19-year-old woman whose mutilated body was found days later, officials said.
The court in New Delhi said Ravi Kumar, Rahul and Vinod, all aged in their 20s, should receive the harshest sentence for the 2012 attack because their crimes fell into the “rarest of rare” category under Indian law.
“Death to all three,” presiding judge Virender Bhat said.
“The convicts shall be hanged till death,” the judge said. The three men, present in the court when the judge read out the sentence, did not show any reaction.
The father of the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, welcomed the judgment, saying he has been so consumed with fighting for justice for his daughter that he has been unable to hold down a job.
“I fought a lone battle for two years, and it has paid off,” the father, 45, who was in court to hear the sentences, said.
The government toughened laws on sexual violence against women in March last year, following outrage at the fatal gang-rape of a student on a Delhi bus in December 2012.
Four adults were sentenced to death last year over that attack, a crime that sparked seething anger about the treatment of women in India.
The new laws allow for the death penalty in cases where a rape victim dies from the attack or is left in a vegetative state.
The woman, who worked as an assistant with a private company in the megacity of Gurgaon on Delhi’s outskirts, was dragged into a car near her home in February 2012 before being gang-raped.  
An attorney in the case told the court that acid had been poured into the eyes of the victim and a broken liquor bottle had been forced into her private parts.  
The convicts repeatedly raped the woman for three days before she died, the prosecution said. Two of the convicts were brothers.
The men had planned to attack the victim as she had rejected advances from one of them, police said during the trial.
The body of the woman, who was working while pursuing her undergraduate studies, was found rotting in a village field in Haryana, miles away from the national capital, three days later.  
The three were convicted of kidnapping, murder and gang-rape.
Terming that crime as “ghastly, brutal and grotesque” in nature, the court said the “extreme sense of brutality and depravity” the accused showed towards the victim would be viewed with “abhorrence and indignation” by the society.
“The perpetrators of crimes like rape and murder forfeit their right to live. The life imprisonment is highly inadequate in these cases and there is no alternative but to impose death sentence,” the court said.
Observing that in the recent past, society has seen a steep increase in the incidents of sexual assault on woman, particularly minor girls, the court said the time has come when the courts should deal with such heinous crime sternly in order to send a strong message to the society.
The court rejected the convicts’ plea seeking leniency.
The defence argued that Vinod was 19 years old, while Ravi, was 22 and Rahul 24, at the time of the crime. The court rejected the defence plea to give them a chance to reform.
The sentence comes amid a renewed debate in India about the death penalty, after the Supreme Court this week spared three people who plotted to kill former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi from the hangman’s noose.