NEW DELHI, Oct 18: The Saket court in New Delhi on Wednesday convicted five persons for the murder of TV journalist Soumya Vishwanathan who was found dead in her car on the night of September 30, 2008.
The police had attributed the crime to robbery. The court also held the accused guilty of loot under provisions of Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA).
Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Baljit Mallick and Akshay Kumar were held guilty of murder and loot while the fifth accused, Ajay Sethi, was held guilty o helping others by receiving the stolen property.
Soumya, a 25-year-old journalist with Headlines Today, was killed on Nelson Mandela Marg in south Delhi’s Vasant Vihar on September 30, 2008 while she was on her way back from work at 3.30 AM. Her body was found in her car with gunshot wounds on her head. Additional Sessions Judge Ravindra Kumar Pandey had reserved the judgement on Friday.
Speaking to the media after the judgment, Soumya’s mother said, “We lost our daughter, but this will act as a deterrent for others.” She said she wants life imprisonment for the convicts.
Police’s first breakthrough in the case came while it was investigating another murder case – that of IT executive Jigisha Ghosh, who was found dead in Faridabad months after Soumya.
Kapoor, Shukla and Malik had been arrested in connection with the IT executive’s death. During questioning, police found their links with the Vasant Vihar murder. Thereafter, two more accused were arrested. In its 620-page charge-sheet filed in 2009, Delhi Police had said the motive behind the murder was robbery.
“They are charged under murder, destruction of evidence, forgery and criminal conspiracy. MCOCA has also been slapped against the all five accused,” senior police officer HGS Dhaliwal had then said.
All the five accused, Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Baljeet Malik, Ajay Kumar and Ajay Sethi, were arrested for killing her and are in custody since March 2009. The police had invoked the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), which was enacted in Maharashtra in 2000 and was extended to Delhi by the union home ministry in 2002, against the accused.
The breakthrough in the Soumya murder case came in 2009 during the investigation in the Jigisha Ghosh murder case when one of the accused confessed to also being involved in the journalist’s murder.
Malik and two others — Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla — were earlier convicted in the 2009 killing of IT executive Jigisha Ghosh. Recovery of the weapon used in Jigisha’s killing had led to the murder case of the journalist getting solved, the police said.
The trial court had awarded death penalty to Kapoor and Shukla and life term to Malik in the Jigisha murder case in 2017. The following year, however, the Delhi High Court commuted the death sentence of Kapoor and Shukla to life imprisonment and upheld the life term of Malik in the Jigisha murder case.
(Manas Dasgupta)