Life term for Himachal man who raped, killed widow in Mohali’s Baltana
The Mohali court of additional district and sessions judge Vikrant Kumar held Sandeep Kumar guilty of sexually assaulting the victim after false promise of marriage and eventually strangulating her to death
A Himachal Pradesh resident who raped and murdered a widow at a hotel in Baltana in 2021 will be spending his remaining life in jail, a local court has ruled.
The court of additional district and sessions judge Vikrant Kumar held Sandeep Kumar guilty of sexually assaulting the victim after false promise of marriage and eventually strangulating her to death.
A fine of ₹20,000 was also slapped on Sandeep,a native of Dobar village, Una, Himachal Pradesh. The detailed order with the court’s observations is awaited.
The complainant in the matter was the victim’s paternal cousin, an Uttar Pradesh native, currently living in Mauli Jagran, Chandigarh.
He told police that his cousin worked as a cleaner at a hotel located on the Patiala-Zirakpur road. Her husband had died of an illness in 2019.
Following his death, his cousin became friends with Sandeep Kumar, who promised to marry her and frequently visited her house in Chandigarh.
But he later back-tracked from his promise and had been harassing her, leaving her depressed, the woman revealed to her cousin.
On September 8, 2021, Sandeep called her to a hotel in Baltana, and the next morning she was found dead.
The complainant, as per the FIR, initially suspected that his cousin was driven to end her life after an ugly spat with Sandeep in the hotel room.
Based on this, police had booked the accused under Sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) at the Zirakpur police station on September 9, 2021.
However, the autopsy report revealed that the woman was raped and strangled to death. Following this revelation, police had booked Sandeep under Sections 302 (murder) and 376 (rape) of IPC.
“The accused initially told us that after their fight, the woman hanged herself from a ceiling fan. When we reached the hotel room, the victim was lying on the bed and the accused had claimed that he got her down. After the autopsy report, the accused confessed to strangling her to death after sexually assaulting her in an inebriated state,” police said in the chargesheet.