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India to seek death penalty for missionary murder India Staines

September 22, 2003

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Indian police will seek the death penalty today for 13 men convicted of murdering Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons, an official said yesterday.

The men set ablaze a jeep which Staines and his sons Philip, 10, and Timothy, eight, were sleeping in outside a church in the eastern state of Orissa more than four years ago.

The attack was provoked by the "corruption of tribal culture" by the missionaries, who fed villagers beef and gave them bras and sanitary napkins, one of the killers was quoted as saying in a newspaper yesterday.

According to The Hindustan Times, Mahendra Hembram told his interrogators that he and another of the convicted killers, Dara Singh, were enraged when on Christmas Day, 1998, they "watched the villagers eating beef and decided to kill Staines".

Many Hindus worship the cow and even those Hindus who eat meat tend to avoid beef.

Hembram said he was "feeling threatened by the inroads the Christians were making", the newspaper reported, quoting an unnamed official in the CBI.

Hembram was angered by what he saw as corruption of tribal culture "by the distribution of sanitary napkins and brassieres to women by missionaries", the CBI official was quoted as saying.

A district court will sentence the 13 men tomorrow. The court found them guilty last week of rioting, arson and culpable homicide amounting to murder.

Culpable homicide amounting to murder can carry the death penalty in some cases but more commonly gets life imprisonment.

Asked if he would seek the death penalty or a life term, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) counsel K Sudhakar told Reuters: "We are going to ask for the higher punishment."

The Hindustan Times yesterday also revealed the contents of a letter Hembram wrote to his sister-in-law.

"I did this because of the bitter relations with the Christians," Hembram said in the letter.

"After hearing so many things about the Christians, we decided to kill the Christians," he wrote.

Hembram wrote the letter from a hide-out after he fled Manoharpur, a village in Orissa, where the crime took place, the paper said. He was arrested later.

Christian missionaries have been in India for centuries, and often are heralded for setting up educational and health facilities in remote areas.

However, they are also accused of using force, money and superstition to convert poor and illiterate villagers to their faith.

The murder of Staines and his sons was one of the worst hate crimes against Christians in years in India, a secular nation where more than 80 per cent of the one billion-plus population are Hindus. Christians make up about two per cent of the population.

The killings came at a time when Hindu nationalist groups were being blamed for a series of attacks on Christians and church property across India. The Home Ministry said it found that a large number of those cases were related to land and property disputes, not religion.

Christian activists said Dara Singh was linked with Hindu groups allied with India's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The party denies any connection.


