Ghaziabad: A man from Bhojpur who killed his wife, packed her body in a sack with salt, buried it in farmland and sowed a crop over it in 2023 was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday. An additional sessions court held Dinesh Kumar guilty of murder, causing disappearance of evidence and giving false evidence.Special Judge (UP Gangster Act) Sushil Kumar-IV said Dinesh killed the woman by strangulation and fracturing her skull, but no eyewitness had been found to prove it. The court held that the crime did not fall in the “rarest of rare” category.“In order to hide the murder related crime, the accused had buried the body and fabricated false evidence to mislead police. Still the said murder by the accused is not sufficiently reflected to determine his crime in the category of rarest of rare. Therefore, keeping in view the facts and circumstances of the case at hand, it appears justified to sentence the convicted accused to rigorous life imprisonment and a fine of Rs 50,000 for the offence under Section 302 of the IPC, seven years rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 7,000 for the offence under Section 201 (disappearance of evidence) and three years rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 3,000 for the offence under Section 193 (giving false evidence),” the court ruled.The court declined to award the fine to the deceased’s family, citing their insufficient cooperation with the legal process. “Since the deceased’s son, examined by the prosecution as a witness, testified in favor of his accused father despite his father having murdered his mother, and prosecution witness Brahm Singh, the deceased’s father, made statements during his cross-examination, deviating from his main examination, it does not appear justified to award any compensation to any person under the Victim Compensation Scheme,” the judge added.The case stems from an FIR registered by Loni police station on Feb 2, 2023, on the complaint of constable Sompal Singh, after the body of a missing woman was recovered. He said the body of the wife of Dinesh, a resident of Falajgarh, was recovered from the bank of a pond on the directions of her husband. According to the FIR, Dinesh confessed to the murder.Police filed a chargesheet after collecting evidence, and the sessions court framed charges on April 27, 2023. Dinesh denied the charges and sought trial.Assistant district govt counsel (criminal) Sunil Kaushik argued that Dinesh was having an extramarital affair. “On the night of Jan 25/26, 2023, he strangled his wife Anju to death and buried her body among sugarcane leaves in a room. The next day he dug a pit near a pond and a sewage drain, sprinkled salt on the deceased’s body, and buried it at around midnight, and then sowed millet over it. Subsequently, he called the deceased’s younger sister to ask if Anju had arrived. The accused then called the deceased’s mother and told her that the deceased had run away. The accused then reported his wife’s disappearance to police station Bhojpur, on Jan 30. Subsequently, while the police were investigating the disappearance, they received information that Dinesh had murdered his wife and would reveal everything if questioned strictly,” he informed the court.The prosecution presented 10 witnesses, including the deceased’s mother, in whom Dinesh had confided and to whom he had admitted the crime. She told the court that Dinesh made her promise not to tell anyone, and that his information proved true once the body was recovered.The judge said the information the accused gave police in custody, which led to the recovery of the body, was directly relevant to the other facts of the case. “The recovery of the deceased’s body is stated to have been based on the information provided by the accused during interrogation while in police custody, and evidence in this regard has been presented by the prosecution in the trial court. Thus, the above-described information provided by the accused to the police while in police custody can be proved under Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872,” the judge concluded, agreeing to give credence to the evidence produced by the prosecution.
