MUMBAI: The
Bombay high court on Thursday upheld the life imprisonment given to a 35-year-old
Indian Navy officer who shot dead his techie girlfriend in a city hotel in 2007.
The body of 24-year-old Kaushumbi Layek, an employee of Tata Consultancy Services, was found with two bullet injuries in Sun and Sheel hotel on May 14, 2007. Days later her boyfriend Manish Thakur, a married man and an employee of the India Navy’s aeronautical wing was picked up from INS Hansa in Goa and booked for the murder.
“This is another case of a love affair going terribly wrong,” said a division bench of Justice Bhushan Gavai and Justice Sarang Kotwal, adding that prosecution had proved the case beyond reasonable doubt. “The victim had willingly accompanied her potential murderer not suspecting his intentions. The culprit had accompanied her after making all the preparations and in particular, carrying weapons with him,” the bench said.
Additional public prosecutor Jayesh Yagnik said that the prosecution case was that the love affair between couple was going through troubled times as Kaushumbi had refused to marry Thakur who was already married to another woman. Advocate Akash Kavde, counsel for Thakur, said that he was in Goa at the naval base at the time of the murder.
The court said the prosecution had proved that the couple had checked into the hotel based on statements by the staff, and his absence from the naval base in Goa was established.
The court said that it was difficult to find the exact motive in such cases. “What transpired (in the hotel room) can be answered only by two persons, one of whom is the victim who is dead and the other is Thakur, who is denying his presence on the scene. Once we have reached the conclusion that he was present with the deceased, then the burden shifts on him which, in this case, he has not discharged,” the court said.
Representative image.
