Nitish Katara murder:SC denies parole for Vikas Yadav,says ‘complete your 25-year sentence’

Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, Nov 04 2019: The Supreme Court Monday rejected the parole plea of Vikas Yadav, one of the accused in the Nitish Katara murder case. “You have been sentenced for 25 years of imprisonment, complete it,” the court said, while dismissing the plea of Yadav for grant of four-week parole.

 

A bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said the convict was awarded 25 years of jail term and it has to be served without any grant of remission. The bench also dismissed another plea of Yadav in which he had challenged the constitutional validity of the Delhi High court order awarding him 25 years of jail term without any remission.

Yadav had sought a grant of parole on grounds that he has already served over 17 years of jail term in the Katara murder case.

Besides Vikas, the apex court had awarded a 25-year jail term to his cousin Vishal Yadav while another co-convict, Sukhdev Pehalwan, was given a 20-year jail term in the murder case.

Vikas, Vishal and Sukhdev were serving life term awarded by the lower court in May 2008 for abducting and killing Katara, a business executive and the son of a railway officer, as they opposed the victim’s affair with Bharti, daughter of Uttar Pradesh politician D P Yadav.

The high court had on April 2, 2014, upheld the verdict of the lower court, by describing the offence as “honour killing” stemming from a “deeply-entrenched belief” in the caste system.

In 2017, the apex court had dismissed the plea by Vikas Yadav seeking a review of its verdict sending him to jail for 25 years. The court said that there was no reason to interfere with the court’s verdict which had modified the award of 30-year jail term, handed down to the Yadavs by the Delhi High Court, saying 25-year imprisonment for the offence of murder and five-year jail term for causing destruction of evidence would run concurrently and not consecutively.

It had also scaled down the jail term of 25 years to 20 years to be awarded to Sukhdev by holding that the jail term for separate offences would not run consecutively, but concurrently.

The court had earlier dismissed the appeals against their convictions in the case for kidnapping Katara from a marriage party on the intervening night of February 16-17, 2002 before killing him for his alleged affair with Bharti Yadav, sister of Vikas.

Courtesy:indianexpress.com