The Delhi High Court has upheld the life imprisonment given to a man, his widow mother and his unmarried brother for the murder of his wife, who used to quarrel with him frequently on living in a separate house.
Justice S. Muralidhar and Justice I. S. Mehta said the three accused failed to offer any explanation for the death of the deceased in their house with no one else being present or having entered the residence.
“This was a fairly small house where the three appellants and the deceased lived in two rooms,” the Bench said, adding, it is not the husband alone who will have to explain the unnatural death of the deceased in the house, but the mother and the brother as well.
The incident happened on the morning of May 10, 2013, on the top floor of a house in Mandawali’s Pandit Mohalla here. The husband had claimed that he was at his father-in-law’s house on the morning of the incident.
He, however, admitted that a quarrel did take place between the deceased and him regarding her insistence on living in a separate house.
Alibis of accused
His mother had claimed that she had gone to a temple at Chander Vihar at 7.30 a.m. and returned only at 9.40 a.m. His brother, who worked as a driver in Madhu Vihar, had claimed he had left for his employer’s house at 8 a.m.
The High Court, however, declined to accept the explanations put forth by the accused as “not believable”.
If indeed the husband found the deceased dead when he came back from the house of the in-laws, that would have been around 8.15 a.m. The mother returned from the temple around 9.30 a.m. It could not have taken them two hours thereafter to take the deceased to the hospital, the High Court noted.
“With each of them putting forth pleas of alibi, which have not been successfully proved by them, the completed chain of proved circumstances point unerringly only to the guilt of the three appellants and no one else,” the HC ruled.
