Holding that “the unbroken chain of circumstantial evidence proved the guilt of the accused beyond reasonable doubt”, a local court here on Monday convicted a man for murdering his parents and burying them in the lawn of their house in Raipur in 2010, and awarded him a life sentence.
Udayan Das, then a resident of Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal, hit national headlines in 2016 when he was arrested for allegedly murdering his live-in partner, Bankura resident Akansha Sharma (28), and hiding her body in a marble platform in his house. The arrest was followed by his own purported sensational disclosure that he had killed his parents — Indrani and B.K. Das — a few years back, because they were “forcing him to study maths”. A West Bengal court has already convicted him for Sharma’s murder in 2020.
After murdering his parents, Udayan called a construction worker and got a pit dug, telling the latter that it was to install a septic tank. It was in that pit, below the lawn in their residence in Raipur’s DD Nagar, that he buried the duo. The case of murder and destruction of evidence was registered in 2017 and the bodies were exhumed.
However, there was no eyewitness to the murder. The doctor who conducted the postmortem accepted the defence’s claim that it could not be established how the duo died. Further, there was no evidence in the form of any neighbour’s or acquaintance’s testimony about whether the deaths were accidental or homicidal, i.e. Udayan had smothered them to death.
The court, however, quoted an earlier Supreme Court order Bodh Raj @ Bodha And Ors vs State Of Jammu And Kashmir from 2002 to conclude that circumstantial evidence in the case outweighed any doubt in the favour of the accused.
“… where a case rests squarely on circumstantial evidence, the inference of guilt can be justified only when all the incriminating facts and circumstances are found to be incompatible with the innocence of the accused or the guilt of any other persons,” the 2002 SC order reads.
