India's Supreme Court is hearing a petition from Dara Singh, also known as Rabindra Kumar Pal, seeking release from prison after more than a quarter of a century in custody for the 1999 murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons. The case, which caused global outrage at the time, is being revisited as Singh, who has expressed regret, petitions for freedom, raising fresh concerns among India's minority Christian community about whether justice will ultimately be served.

Singh led a mob that burned Staines and his sons, aged six and ten, alive in their jeep in Odisha in January 1999, accusing the missionary of forcibly converting Hindus to Christianity. Convicted and initially sentenced to death in 2003, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the high court in 2005 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2011; he was also later convicted in 2007 for two further killings of a Catholic priest and a Muslim trader that same year.