Death Penalty News

4 men, including a Hindu priest, have been charged with the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in the Indian capital Delhi, police said Saturday, in a case that has once again highlighted widespread sexual violence and caste-based discrimination in the country. The men, who were arrested on August 2, have been formally charged with rape, murder, and destruction of evidence, among other crimes, the Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement.  They could face the death penalty if found guilty. The victim belonged to India's Dalit community, the most oppressed in Hinduism's caste-based hierarchy, senior police official Ingit Pratap Singh told CNN.  The victim was allegedly gang-raped and killed on August 1 in a southwestern district of the Indian capital, after she had gone to fetch water from a crematorium, he said. The crematorium's priest had called the victim's mother and showed her the body of her dead child, Singh said, citing the mother's statement.  The pri...

TOKYO (AP) — Until recently, the location of executed wartime Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's remains was one of World War II's biggest mysteries in the nation he once led. Now, a Japanese university professor has revealed declassified U.S. military documents that appear to hold the answer. The documents show the cremated ashes of Tojo, one of the masterminds of the Pearl Harbor attack, were scattered from a U.S. Army aircraft over the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, south of Tokyo. It was a tension-filled, highly secretive mission, with American officials apparently taking extreme steps meant to keep Tojo's remains, and those of six others executed with him, away from ultra-nationalists looking to glorify them as martyrs. The seven were hanged for war crimes just before Christmas in 1948, three years after Japan’s defeat. The discovery brings partial closure to a painful chapter of Japanese history that stil...

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka will ban the wearing of the burqa and shut more than a thousand Islamic schools, a government minister said on Saturday, the latest actions affecting the country’s minority Muslim population. Minister for public security Sarath Weerasekera told a news conference he had signed a paper on Friday for cabinet approval to ban the full face covering worn by some Muslim women on “national security” grounds. “In our early days Muslim women and girls never wore the burqa,” he said. “It is a sign of religious extremism that came about recently. We are definitely going to ban it.” The wearing of the burqa in the majority-Buddhist nation was temporarily banned in 2019 after the bombing of churches and hotels by Islamic militants that killed more than 250. Other countries have enacted burqa bans in recent years as well, including Switzerland, France, and Denmark. RELATED |  While Iranian Women Are Routinely Flogged for Not Wearing the Hijab, UN Rights Office Lamen...