Nearly seven and a half years after an L & T engineer by was found dead at his Navi Mumbai flat with 25 stab wounds on his body, a Thane district court on Monday convicted three accused and sentenced them to life imprisonment for brutally murdering one Deepan Banerjee.
Holding that the Prosecution had proved “beyond reasonable doubt” that three of the five accused conspired and murdered an engineer from M/s Larson & Toubro Banerjee (27) Thane’s Additional Session Judge HM Patwardhan held Vinod Vishnu Bandal, Suraj Popatrao Gurav, both aged 30 years and Santosh Bandu Raut (37 ) guilty of committing the heinous crime.
However, the court acquitted two other accused Vishal Nirkute( 34) and Sachin Gaikwad (35) for lack of sufficient evidence. The Prosecution’s case was that Bandal, a food delivery man, had conspired with his accomplices to rob and kill Banerjee, who used to live alone in a flat at Airoli in Navi Mumbai.
Banerjee, who used work with L&T at Powai, was found lying dead in Airoli flat on August 12, 2010. Banerjee’s murder had generated considerable public interest in the city.
According to the Prosecution, Bandal and other accused forced their way inside Banerjee’s flat and threatened the latter at knife point and asked him to part with all valuables with him. When Banerjee resisted, Bandal and accused stabbed him 27 times and left him bleeding profusely.
Banerjee died before his neighbour found the former lying in a pool of blood and lodged complaint with the police. After forcing their way in, Bandal and the other accused Suraj Popatrao Gurav (30 ), Santosh Bandu Raut (37 ) asked Banerjee to give them all his valuables. They stabbed him and left him bleeding. The accused inflicted as many as 27 stab wounds on the victim and left him to die.
The accused had decamped from the crime scene with a mere Rs 200 cash, a new camera and his laptop. .
A shirt stained with blood recovered from the crime scene helped the police track down one of the accused in the case.
The investigators traced the tailor of the shirt with the mark that was printed on the back of the shirt and found that the shirt was stitched by a tailor from Karad in western Maharashtra
The investigations revealed that the person who had got the shirt stitched had “loaned” his short to Suraj Gaurav, one of the accused.
Having identified Gurav was one of the key accused, the investigators interrogated him and arrested other accused based on the information by the former.
Seeking death penalty for the accused, the Prosecution termed the crime as the “rarest of rare one” since it was a premeditated cold blooded murder. Incidentally, the entire case was based on the circumstantial evidence.