New Delhi: A Delhi court on Monday sentenced Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla to death and Baljeet Malik to life for murdering and robbing IT executive Jigisha Ghosh in 2009, observing that it was a "brutal" and "cold blooded murder".
During arguments on the quantum of punishment, Delhi Police asked for death penalty for the convicts, saying they killed her for "pleasure" and showed no remorse.
The judge observed that gruesome crimes against women were on the rise and any leniency to the criminals would send a wrong message to society. "The offence was committed in a brutal, cold blooded and cruel manner. The victim was helpless and remained in captivity for hours and the convicts brutally mauled her to death. It was an uncivilised act done in a barbaric manner. The magnitude and brutality of the crime makes it fall in the category of rarest of rare," the judge said.
Twenty-eight year old Jigisha, working as an operations manager in a management consultancy firm, was abducted and killed on March 18, 2009, after she was dropped by her office cab around 4 am near her home in Vasant Vihar area of South Delhi. Her body was recovered three days later from a place near Surajkund in Haryana.
The court had in July 2016, held the three men guilty of murder, abduction, robbery, forgery and common intention under IPC, saying it was "abundantly clear" that they had committed the crime. Kapoor was also convicted for the offence of using firearms under the Arms Act.
While convicting them on July 14, the judge had said "they committed her murder and disposed of her body in bushes and circumstantial evidence makes it clear that it was these men who committed the crime."
The police had filed the charge sheet in the case in June 2009 and trial began on April 15, 2010.
Recovery of the weapon allegedly used in Jigisha's murder had led to the cracking of the murder case of Soumya Vishwanathan, who was a journalist with a news channel. Soumya was shot dead on September 30, 2008, while she was returning home in her car from office in the wee hours.
Police had claimed robbery as the motive behind the killing of both Jigisha and Soumya.
The accused had used Jigisha's ATM card to buy expensive goggles, wrist watches and shoes from Sarojini Nagar market in South Delhi, police had said.
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