NGO owner Brajesh Thakur, 18 others convicted in Muzaffarpur shelter home case

A Delhi court on Monday convicted people including NGO owner Brajesh Thakur for sexual assault of girls at Muzaffarpur shelter home in Bihar. The court has fixed January 28 for arguments on the quantum of sentence in the case.

The court convicted Thakur for aggravated sexual assault and gang rape. The court also acquitted one of the accused in the case.

The court had earlier deferred for the third time pronouncement of judgement in the case till January 20 after the petition was filed before it. On December 12, the court had deferred the judgment for a second time in the case till January 14 as Judge Saurabh Kulshrestha, who had conducted the trial, was on leave.

Earlier in November, the court had deferred by a month till December 12 as the as the accused could not be brought to court premises from jail due to lawyers’ strike in all six district courts in Delhi.

More than 42 minors were allegedly sexually assaulted over a period of time in the shelter home which was run by Thakur’s state-funded NGO. The matter had come to light in February 2018 after the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) conducted a social audit and submitted the report to the Bihar government, highlighting the sexual abuse on the shelter home inmates for the first time.