Rajkot: A sessions court in Junagadh has sentenced five men to life imprisonment for the murder of 22-year-old Dhara Kadiwar, who was allegedly killed in June 2022 after being lured from Junagadh on the pretext of going to Ahmedabad for settlement proceedings in a rape case she had filed against the prime accused.Additional sessions judge H G Damodra, in a judgment delivered on Wednesday convicted Suraj alias Bhuvaji Solanki (32), Gunjan Joshi (30), Meet Shah (25), Yuvraj Solanki (29) and Mukesh Solanki (25) under IPC sections 302, 120B and 201. The court sentenced each of them to life imprisonment for murder and criminal conspiracy, and three years’ rigorous imprisonment for causing disappearance of evidence.Three other accused — Sanjay Soheliya, Jugal Shah and Mona Shah — were acquitted after the court gave them the benefit of doubt.According to the prosecution, Dhara had been in a live-in relationship with Suraj, who was married. She had filed a rape complaint against him at Junagadh B-division police station on Feb 24, 2022. After a settlement between the two, Dhara and Suraj again began living together, but disputes continued. The prosecution argued that Suraj, under family pressure and because of Dhara’s insistence on marriage, conspired with the other accused to eliminate her.On June 19, 2022, Dhara was taken from Junagadh in a car on the pretext of going to Ahmedabad for court proceedings. Instead, she was taken to a farm near a village in Sayla taluka of Surendranagar district.Once at the farm, Suraj stepped out of the car on the pretext of collecting money. It was then that Meet Shah, sitting in the back seat, pulled Dhara’s dupatta around her neck, suffocating her to death.After she died, the group—including Yuvraj, Gunjan and Mukesh—gathered dry wood, dumped her body in a pit, and set it completely ablaze using petrol that Mukesh had procured earlier.A Web of Deceit and Evidence DestructionAfter the crime, the perpetrators filed a false missing person report at the Paldi police station in Ahmedabad, concocting a story that Dhara had left Meet Shah’s house early in the morning without informing anyone.To mislead the police and the victim’s family, Gunjan and Yuvraj traveled all the way to Mumbai with Dhara’s mobile phone. They kept the phone active, sent fake WhatsApp messages pretending to be Dhara and claiming she was leaving Suraj’s life, and eventually threw the device into a creek in Mumbai to destroy the evidence.The case first surfaced as a missing-person inquiry after Dhara’s brother, Meet Kadiwar, approached Paldi police in Ahmedabad. During the investigation, police found that several accused were together around the time of the incident. The FIR for murder was eventually registered in 2023.Relying on circumstantial evidence, call detail records (CDRs), mobile tower locations spanning from Junagadh to Mumbai, and forensic analysis of the skeletal remains found at the Sayla farm, the prosecution proved the guilt of the five men.
