After being wrongly convicted and imprisoned for eight years in the Ayesha Meera rape and murder case, Satyam Babu has now sought compensation of Rs 10 crore.
On Tuesday, Satyam Babu visited the National Commission for Scheduled Castes in New Delhi and submitted a letter, seeking compensation of Rs 10 crore.
In his letter, Satyam Babu has alleged that the police had brutally assaulted him and threatened to kill his mother and sister.
“I confessed to committing the crime under duress. When the police arrested me, they assaulted me brutally and told me to say that I had murdered Ayesha Meera. When I did not relent, they threatened to kill my mother and sister. I was extremely scared as to what they could do and the power they had, which is why I said that I had committed the crime,” Satyam Babu said.
“During the period of my imprisonment, my family suffered financially and in order to make up for my wrongful conviction and for my family’s suffering I have asked for a compensation of Rs 10 crore,” he added.
Satyam Babu said that the Commission has assured him of a favourable outcome.
In his letter, he also stated that like Nirbhaya, Ayesha Meera too deserves justice and demanded that a through probe be conducted to bring out the real culprits.
“Ayesha Meera’s family members have time and again said that I was not the culprit. They have waited so many years for justice and they deserve it,” he said.
Seventeen-year-old Ayesha Meera was a first-year pharmacy student and was living in a ladies hostel at Ibrahimpatnam near Vijayawada. Her blood-stained body was found in December 2007 in the hostel’s bathroom with multiple stab injuries. A year after her death, the police arrested Satyam Babu in a cell phone robbery case. The police, however, claimed that he had confessed to the murder during interrogation.
Satyam Babu was convicted by a Vijayawada women's special sessions court in 2010, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.
However, even family members of the victim, along with several activists, had alleged that Satyam was framed to let a politician's family off the hook.
When the case first broke out, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu was the state's Opposition leader, and had demanded that a fair enquiry be done into the incident.
Naidu was also among those who alleged that the Congress government was covering up the case to protect influential politicians.
Ayesha’s parents had alleged that former Congress Minister Koneru Ranga Rao's grandson, Koneru Satish frequently visited the hostel along with other relatives, including Koneru Suresh, Abburi Ganesh, Chinita Pawankumar and Rakesh.
They also alleged that the warden, Koneru Padma, allowed them to enter the girls' hostel as they were relatives.
The parents held these people squarely responsible for their daughter's death.