Noida: An additional sessions court has sentenced three brothers to a life term in prison for killing their sister’s boyfriend and disposing of his body in a canal in 2022. The court held that the case did not fall in the “rarest of the rare” category and awarded life terms instead of capital punishment.It, however, did not find credible evidence to establish the roles of their sister and mother and acquitted them of all charges. An accomplice of the brothers was also convicted and sentenced to four years in jail for assisting in disposing of the body.An FIR was registered at the Surajpur police station on March 1, 2022, based on a complaint filed by one Fireyram. He told the cops that his nephew Robin had been missing for the past couple of days. He last saw Robin on Feb 27 before he left to see Monica’s mother, Anju, for some work. Monica and Robin had been in a relationship for several years. That night he saw Monica’s brothers — Subodh, Ravi and Sagar — drive past him in a white hatchback. He tried to stop them, but they just zoomed past him. He later came to know that Robin was missing and started suspecting that Monica’s family had kidnapped Robin and murdered him as they did not like his affair with Monica. “They had threatened Robin several times,” he told the police.A case was filed under IPC sections 364 (kidnapping), 302 (murder) and 201 (disappearance of evidence) against Subodh, Ravi and Sagar along with unknown family members.Police filed a chargesheet against them and added the names of Anju Devi, Monica and their friend Manish to it. IPC sections 120B (punishment of criminal conspiracy) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) were added to the charges mentioned in the FIR. The court framed charges against the six on April 4, 2023.The prosecution presented Robin’s cousin Dinesh as one of the key witnesses. He told the court that after Robin had gone missing, Monica’s brothers had told him that they had strangled Robin with a cable, tied his limbs and then dumped his body in a canal. Manish had helped them in getting rid of the body. They wanted Dinesh to convince his maternal uncle Fireyman to take his complaint back.The brothers allegedly confessed to the crime, and it was corroborated by the autopsy report of the body recovered from the canal. “Therefore, the case against accused Subodh, Sagar and Ravi is no longer based on mere motive or suspicion. The circumstances against them—the sighting of them in the car, the confession, the information about the body being thrown into the canal, the recovery of the body from the canal, and the medical evidence of strangulation—are mutually corroborating,” judge Sunil Kumar-I said.He, however, also noted that the charge against accused Anju relates to calling Robin, but neither the witnesses nor the investigating officer could establish a technical match with Robin’s call detail record or the alleged phone number of Anju. The court said Monica is central to the prosecution’s case, as her alleged love affair with Robin is cited as the reason for the grudge against him. “However, the affair or the motive itself does not establish Monica’s criminal involvement,” the court concluded.
