THE ringleader of a gang that burnt an Australian missionary and his two young sons to death was sentenced to die by an Indian court yesterday.

Dara Singh, a Hindu extremist regarded by some on the religious Right as a nationalist hero, was sentenced by the court in Orissa days after he had been found guilty of leading the brutal mob killing.

Twelve others involved in the attack were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The killing of Graham Staines and his sons four years ago came amid a wave of attacks on Christians by Hindu extremists opposed to the conversion of Hindus to other faiths. The brutality of the attack and the extreme youth of two of the victims shocked the nation.

Mr Staines had lived in Orissa for more than 30 years, working with leprosy patients. On the night of the killings in January 1999 he and his sons Philip, 8, and Timothy, 10, were asleep in a car outside a church in rural Orissa when a mob surrounded them and set the vehicle ablaze. The mob prevented their escape with axes and steel bars and all three were burnt alive.

The murder came amid growing tension between Hindus and members of India’s religious minorities, who were blamed for trying to lure Hindus away from their religious and cultural roots through force and bribes. A confessional letter written by one of Singh’s co-defendants and published this week after the convictions gave a glimpse into the hatred and religious tensions leading up to the murders.

“I did this because of the bitter relations with the Christians,” Mahendra Hembram wrote in a letter to his sister-in-law while on the run from the police in the months after the attack. He expressed outrage at what he saw as the corruption of traditional tribal values by missionaries, who committed such sins as distributing sanitary towels and bras.

The final insult apparently took place on Christmas Day, when he and Singh watched villagers eating beef, defying one of the strongest taboos in Hindu culture. “After hearing so many things about the Christians, we decided to kill the Christians,” he wrote.

Police identified Singh, a renowned local Hindu radical, as the chief suspect soon after the attack but were unable to arrest him for more than a year because of the efforts of sympathetic Hindu villagers to protect him from justice.

It is also alleged that he had killed a Christian priest and a Muslim trader while on the run. He has yet to stand trial for those murders.

The sentence against him will come as a blow to the World Hindu Council, the Hindu nationalist movement linked to India’s ruling party, of which he was a prominent member. Many of its leaders had given fervent support to Singh after his arrest, attending receptions in his honour and hailing him more as a hero than a killer.

The death penalty, which under Indian law can be imposed only in “the rarest of rare cases,” has traditionally been applied only in the most gruesome and politically sensitive cases, such as the murders of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s founding father, and Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister.

The last time that it was handed down was to the Muslim militants found guilty of assisting the suicide gunmen who attacked the Indian parliament in December 2001.

Prosecutors hailed the sentence as evidence of the judiciary’s independence in a state governed by the Hindu party.

“This is a good judgment and it will increase public faith in the judicial system,” K. Sudhakar, a lawyer for the Central Bureau of Investigation, told reporters outside the heavily guarded courthouse.

Relatives of the victims, however, reacted with dismay. “I didn’t want to see the man put to death,” said John Staines, Mr Staines’s elder brother, who had asked judges for clemency for the killers. “He has to answer to God for what he did.

“They committed a terrible crime, but the sort of thing that Jesus Christ espoused was that if we can’t forgive our fellow men, then how can he forgive us?” His sentiments were echoed by Mr Staines’s widow, Gladys, who has remained in Orissa with her daughter since the murders to continue her husband’s work with leprosy patients.

Whether Singh will actually reach the gallows is still in question. Of the several dozen death penalties handed down in recent decades, at least half have been commuted.

Lawyers for the men said that they would appeal both the sentence and the verdict, a process that could take years.

In the final instance, the decision on whether Singh must die lies in the hands of the president.

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