In March 2002, Bilkis Yakub Rasool, 19, was brutally raped by a mob that also killed 14 members of her family – including her three-year-old daughter Saleha – in Gujarat’s Dahod district. Bilkis was five months pregnant at the time.
The men who assaulted her family that day – in Randhikpur village of Limkheda taluka – were from her village. She knew them all.
The case was probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation on the Supreme Court’s direction in December 2003; the accused were arrested a month later. In August 2004, the Supreme Court transferred the trial to Mumbai, where, in January 2008, a special CBI court found 13 of the 20 accused guilty. Of them, 11 were given life sentences.
In May 2017, the Bombay High Court upheld the life imprisonment of all 11 serving their sentences and quashed the acquittal of the seven accused who were let off.
Over five years later, on August 15, 2022, remission was granted to the 11 life convicts, based on the recommendation of a jail advisory committee set up by Gujarat government.
— source ruralindiaonline.org | Aug. 24, 2022