New Delhi, August 29: A Delhi court has sentenced a woman, her father and one of her brothers to life imprisonment for killing her businessman husband in 2005 to avoid returning Rs 10 lakh borrowed from him. Additional Sessions Judge Virender Kumar Goyal also imposed a fine of Rs 75,000 each on Anju Verma, her father Purushottam Lal and her brother Baljinder Singh after holding them guilty of murder, criminal conspiracy and destruction of evidence under the IPC.
The court relied upon the circumstantial evidence besides the last seen evidence in the form of statement of a security guard and the conduct of the convicts to hold them guilty of the murder of businessman Trilok Verma on September 30, 2005.
According to the prosecution, Verma (42), who ran a paints manufacturing unit in west Delhi, was killed at his Punjabi Bagh flat and his body was dumped in Ghaziabad by the accused persons as they could not pay back a Rs 10 lakh loan which they had taken from him. Anju, who gave Rs 40,000 to the housing society”s security guard Akhilesh Singh after the fateful night when Verma went missing, failed to give any plausible explanation before the court about the reason for handing over the money.
She claimed that the money was given to the guard as she wanted him to keep it safe. “The explanation is strange.
I do not think that it was the best method to save money by handing over the same to the guard, who was not having any place to put the money in safe custody. Accused Anju Verma is not an illiterate lady.
She could have saved the money by depositing the same in the bank,” ASJ said. The case was registered with Punjabi Bagh police station on October 3, 2005, on the statement of the supervisor of the security guard who had informed about the suspicious act of Anju.
During the trial, he stood his ground and deposed that he saw the victim being taken by the convicts in their Honda City car on the night of the murder. The court also relied upon the statement of the friends of the victim who testified before it that the deceased was disturbed as the convicts did not return Rs 10 lakh that they had borrowed from him.
Accused Vijay Kumar Kittu, another brother of Anju, was held guilty only of the offence of destruction of evidence and sentenced to an over four-year jail term that he had already served during the judicial custody in the case. Two other accused in the case were acquitted for want of evidence.
——-PTI