An Indian court jailed a 31-year-old man for life on Monday following the rape and murder of a young Irish woman in the tourist resort state of Goa, nearly eight years after the crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The victim, whose name cannot be disclosed under Indian law, was 28 when she visited Goa in March 2017 and befriended Vikat Bhagat, the man convicted of the crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cToday the court has given the final verdict, life imprisonment to the accused,\u201d investigating officer Filomeno Costa told the ANI<\/em> news agency, in which Reuters<\/em> has a minority stake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her lawyer, Vikas Varma, said the body was discovered in a forested area of Goa\u2019s Palolem beach, bearing multiple injuries, including some on her face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNothing can compensate the loss of a child, but the sentence has diluted the grief of the family,\u201d Varma said in a statement to Reuters<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was a long battle of nearly eight years but justice has been done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Forensic reports confirmed the woman was raped and her face smashed in with a beer bottle to frustrate efforts to identify her, the lawyer said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bhagat\u2019s lawyers asked the court to take a lenient view in handing down the sentence, media reported. Reuters<\/em> could not immediately contact them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n India tightened laws<\/a> on rape and set up fast-track special courts after the brutal 2012 gang-rape<\/a> of a young woman in a Delhi bus and her murder shocked the country. But more than a decade later, the picture is still grim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reuters<\/em> investigations last year showed India had slashed its targeted number of such courts to 790 by 2026, from 2,600 projected earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last month, a court handed a life sentence<\/a> to a police volunteer convicted of the rape and murder<\/a> of a junior doctor at a hospital in the eastern city of Kolkata.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An Indian court jailed a 31-year-old man for life on Monday following the rape and murder of a young Irish woman in the tourist resort state of Goa, nearly eight years after the crime. The victim, whose name cannot be disclosed under Indian law, was 28 when she visited Goa in March 2017 and befriended […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":9676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia","category-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9675"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}