COIMBATORE: Four students of an engineering college from Sulur were sentenced to one-year imprisonment by a Coimbatore court on Monday for harassing a junior at their college hostel in 2008.
On September 17, 2008, two of the accused persons, Mohammed Safi and Aniz, 18, along with five others had sexually harassed their junior, aged 17, when he was bathing.
However, again on October 8, Safi, Aniz and two others Anandakumar, 18, and Mohan, 18 had attacked the victim with some object causing injuries to him in the hostel.
On receiving a complaint from the boy's parents, the police registered a case against the four students, besides on the college vice-principal, Ayyappan, manager, Anil Kumar and hostel warden Shankar.
The district mahila court, however, acquitted Ayyappan and Anil Kumar, while the four students were awarded one-year term in prison and imposed a fine of Rs 1,000 on each of them.
They were also sentenced to one year extra under the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Ragging Act. However both sentences are to run concurrently.
The hostel warden Shankar was also sentenced to a year in prison and fined Rs 5,000 for trying to conceal the ragging incident.
A native of Wayanad in Kerala, the victim had joined the hostel just then. When the boy raised the issue with the college management, the seven students were suspended for a while.
