A Delhi court on November 25 sentenced four men to life imprisonment for killing TV journalist Soumya Vishwanathan in 2008. The court also awarded a fifth person three years in jail for receiving the stolen property of the deceased.
Vishwanathan was shot dead in the wee hours of September 30, 2008 when she was returning home from her office in car on Nelson Mandela Marg here. Police had claimed that the motive behind her killing was robbery as some of her belongings had been missing.
The court sentenced Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Baljeet Malik, and Ajay Kumar to life imprisonment and also imposed a fine of ₹1.25 lakh on each of them. It sentenced the fifth convict, Ajay Sethi, to three years of simple imprisonment along with a fine of ₹7.25 lakh. The court noted that Sethi had already undergone more than 14 years of imprisonment.
While announcing the quantum of punishment, the court said the offence does not fall in the category of rarest of rare cases. So request for death penalty is refused, the court further said. The court ordered that of the total fine amount imposed on the convicts, ₹12 lakh will be paid to the victim’s family.
Madhavi Vishwanathan, mother of deceased, was present in the Saket court on November 25 when convicts were handed their sentences. “In a way, we are also enduring life imprisonment,” she told the media at the court premises.
“I cannot say I am satisfied. But this is the right message. A message has been given to society that you have to face consequences for what you do. You reap what you sow,” Ms. Madhavi Vishwanathan told ANI.
On October 18, the court convicted Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Baljeet Malik, and Ajay Kumar under Indian Penal Code section 302 (murder) and Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) provisions for committing organised crime resulting in the death of any person.
Ajay Sethi was convicted under IPC section 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property) and MCOCA provisions for conspiring to abet, aid, or knowingly facilitate organised crime and receiving proceeds of organised crime.
The police, in March 2009, during the investigation into the murder of BPO employee Jigisha Ghosh, interrogated the three accused and one among them later confessed to having been involved in the murder of Soumya as well.
The trial court had awarded death penalty to Kapoor and Shukla and sentenced Malik to life term in the Jigisha Ghosh murder case in August 2016. In January 2018, the High Court had commuted the death sentence of Kapoor and Shukla to life imprisonment and upheld the life term of Malik.
