By IANS,
New Delhi : Delhi High Court Wednesday awarded life imprisonment to four people who were accused of killing a man and his father and torching their property in Delhi Cantonment during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in the capital.
Justice S.L. Bhayana awarded life imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs.36,000 on all the four accused after the lower court had acquitted them in 1990.
“It is not a case of ordinary murder and loot. This incident was an attack on one particular community where they were killed and their property was burnt,” Justice Bhayana said in his order while pulling up the lower court for treating the case like an ordinary one.
The case dates back to Nov 1, 1984, when Rajinder Singh and his father Sardaul Singh, were killed and their property was burnt by Surender Pal, Virender, Ram Lal and Lal Bahadur.
The lower court had in Oct 1990 acquitted all the four accused because of the delay in registering the First Information Report (FIR) and recording of the statement of witnesses in the case.
Harjit Kaur, wife of Rajinder Singh, who was also present in the house during the incident, had sent her son and daughter to her father’s home in Hari Nagar in West Delhi after the situation began to take a turn for the worse.
The court had booked all the four under section 302 (murder), 147 (rioting), 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object), 449 (house-trespass in order to commit offence punishable with death) and 396 (dacoity with murder).