A sessions court in Mumbai on May 24 has sentenced death penalty to Parvez Tak in the 2011 murder case of actor Laila Khan and five others from her family.
On May 9, Judge Sachin Balvant Pawar held Mr. Tak guilty of murder and destruction of evidence among other offences under the Indian Penal Code. The judge said that the case falls under the ‘rarest of rare’ category and sentenced him to death. The Bombay High Court will confirm the death sentence.
A resident of Kashmir, Tak was arrested on July 8, 2012, on the charges of murdering Ms. Khan, her elder sister Azmina, twin siblings Zara and Imran, cousin Reshma and mother Shelina at their Igatpuri bungalow near Nashik in Maharashtra in February 2011.
Nadir Patel, Shelina’s ex-husband, lodged a missing complaint at the Oshiwara police station.
The investigation
The police investigation revealed that Tak and Selina argued over her property. During the argument, Tak killed his wife and then killed the other victims. He was later arrested by the Jammu and Kashmir police. The bodies of the victims were recovered from the farmhouse.
The prosecution had examined around 40 witnesses in the trial against Tak. Public prosecutor Pankaj Chavan had sought the death penalty for Tak, calling it a planned brutal murder of six people in a family whose bodies were decomposed in a pit near the house.
