OUR LEGAL REPORTER
An appeal by 18-year-old student Kuntal Sain’s killers against the life sentence awarded to them by the Howrah district sessions judge four months ago was admitted in the high court on Tuesday.
Kuntal, a resident of Shibpur, Howrah, was murdered in July 2004 by his friends Sampad Mukherjee and Arijit Pal. Sampad’s mother Manjusha and brother Jyotirmoy helped the two.
The four were arrested and tried for the murder. Sampad, 21, died in Presidency jail after a throat ailment in October 2004. The other three moved the high court challenging the legality of the earlier judgment.
“The trial judge had failed to find the motive of the murder. Moreover, the prosecution could not prove Manjusha and Jyotirmoy’s involvement in the incident but they were still awarded life sentences,” Jayanta Narayan Chatterjee, the lawyer representing the convicts, told the division bench of Justice D.P. Sengupta and Justice Tapas Kumar Giri while moving the appeal.
According to police, Sampad, who had dropped out of college, had invited his neighbour Kuntal to his house at Sasthitala in Howrah on July 2, 2004.
Arijit, Kuntal’s senior at St Thomas School in Dasnagar, reached Sampad’s house soon after Kuntal got there on his motorcycle.
Sampad and Arijit, with the help of Manjusha and Jyotirmoy, confined Kuntal to a room and allegedly demanded a ransom of Rs 25 lakh from his father Avijit, a prominent trader in the area.
He agreed to pay but, on a hunch, sent a friend of Kuntal to check if his son had been detained by the Mukherjees. The three members of the Mukherjee family and Arijit, none of whom had criminal record, managed to send the friend away but feared that they might get caught.
That evening, Arijit and Sampad took Kuntal to Pankuria, also in Howrah. They hit him with a chopper over 40 times and dumped the body under a railway bridge at Salap More.
Shibpur police had started probing the murder on the basis of a complaint lodged by Kuntal’s father the same day. The trial began in 2005.
This is not a fit case for me to comment since this is being put in front of learned judges.
However, seeing the problems created by extortionist, rapist, murderers and terrorists to society and our judges continuing being lenient to these animals, I have to air my views.
The above criminals premeditated the murder with intent to extort money from the victims father. How can the defence lawyer find no motive.
The case should be tried expeditiously and the criminals made to serve the life sentence.
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