Senior IPS officer RK Sharma was Monday awarded life imprisonment by a Delhi court in the Shivani Bhatnagar murder case. The court said he did not deserve the death penalty due to his "excellent" service record. Three other convicts were also sentenced to life imprisonment for the gruesome killing.
Additional Sessions Judge Rajender Kumar Shastri, disallowing the prosecution's plea that the convicts be sent to the gallows, said, "RK Sharma has got an excellent service record as a police officer and the extreme penalty was not needed in this case." Pronouncing the quantum of sentence in a packed court room, he added, "Moreover, Sharma has no previous criminal history."
Besides Sharma, those sentenced to life imprisonment are hired killer Pradeep Sharma, Sri Bhagwan, and Satya Prakash. Apart from the jail sentence in the nine-year-old murder case, the court also imposed a fine of Rs 20,000 on Sharma and Rs 10,000 each on the other three accused.
Fifty-four-year old Sharma, a 1976-batch Haryana cadre IPS officer, along with three others, was convicted on March 18 for plotting Bhatnagar's murder in her east Delhi apartment on January 23, 1999. Shivani, a senior journalist with the Indian Express, was brutally stabbed to death in her her Navkunj Apartments in East Delhi while she was alone with her two-month-old son.
“No doubt, the murder in itself is an abominable and heinous crime, offender of which can never be pardoned but the offence under consideration was not of that ilk which could shock the conscience of the society,†the judge noted in his 13-page order on the quantum of sentence.
According to the journalist's sister Shivanti, Shivani was upset because of Sharma’s lack of interest in her and had threatened Sharma of exposing him for leaking a secret St Kitts case document to her when he was posted as Officer on Special Duty in the Prime Minister’s Office in 1997. After her murder, the document was handed over to the police by Shivani’s husband Rakesh Bhatnagar.
The chargesheet prepared by the Delhi police said that Sharma wanted to have her killed to save his job. The chargesheet also mentioned an intimate relation between the two. Bhatnagar's gold chain also provided a necessary clue in the case which was recovered from one of the accused and was later identified by Shivani’s husband.
The investigation into the case took over three years and the trial commenced in 2003. Out of the 209 prosecution witnesses, 51 had turned hostile during the trial which was heard by four judges. The prosecution, however, successfully managed to establish the chain of circumstantial evidence to achieve conviction in the case almost nine years after the murder. The court relied on the calls made by Sharma to the three men soon after the reporter was murdered. The court held that this was the strongest evidence to nail the four accused.
Six persons, including Sharma, had been charged under Section 302 (murder), 120 B (conspiracy), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence), 403 and 404 (dishonest misappropriation of property) of the of the Indian Penal Code.
