A Himachal Pradesh court on Wednesday sentenced three men to death for kidnapping and murdering a four-year-old boy in 2014, PTI reported. Shimla Sessions Judge Virendra Singh had on August 6 convicted Chander Sharma, Tajender Singh and Vikrant Bakshi for killing the child.

The victim’s father said the judgment restored his faith in the judiciary. “They had committed the rarest of rare crimes by kidnapping and drowning my four-year-old son and forcing him to drink liquor,” he told PTI.

The boy was kidnapped from Ram Bazar in Himachal Pradesh on June 14, 2014, and his remains were found in a Shimla Municipal Corporation water tank in Kelston in January 2016. His murder triggered several protests demanding the capital punishment for the perpetrators. The Criminal Investigation Department took over the case in August 2016.

The prosecution had claimed that the boy was tortured, starved and forcibly served liquor before being tied to a stone and thrown alive into a water tank. Public prosecutor Randip Singh Parmar told the news agency that 105 witness statements were recorded in this case.

The accused include a Himachal Pradesh University law student, a cosmetics shop owner and an engineering student, Hindustan Times reported.