By DPA
Krefeld (Germany) : Two Indians who were captured in the US were jailed in Germany Thursday, 13 years after the torture and murder of a fellow Indian man.
The victim was beaten inside an apartment for several hours with a steel rod because of a phone call in which he had proposed sex to an Indian woman. They gradually smashed his bones and he ultimately died of cardiac and circulatory failure.
The court in Krefeld, on the Dutch border, sentenced one defendant to life and his accomplice to 14 years in prison.
“The victim must have suffered indescribable pain,” said the judge as he handed down the conviction for the May 1995 lynching, said to have been conducted by several vengeful Indian men.
The woman’s husband was convicted in 1997 of murder for leading the gang attack and sentenced to life by a German court. He was later deported to India to serve the remainder.
According to the indictment, the 35-year-old defendant given life Thursday said of the battered victim, “He’ll have to be killed off completely so he doesn’t tell the police.”
The court rejected claims by defence counsel that the two were only guilty of fatal assault or failing to assist an injured man.
The Krefeld city police never forgot the two accused who were at large, and finally tracked down one in the southern US state of Florida. The US police had detained them. Their trial in Germany began last October.