New Delhi, Jan 2 A Delhi court has convicted a priest and his wife for murdering a man and attempting to destroy evidence by burning his body inside a temple room in east Delhi's Kailash Nagar in 2017.
Additional Sessions Judge Anurag Thakur held the priest Lakhan Dubey and his wife Kamlesh guilty of offences punishable under Sections 302 (murder), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.
The court noted that the body of Chander Shekhar was found on September 27, 2017, in the temple room where Dubey worked as a priest and had exclusive access, including custody of the key to the staircase leading to the room.
"The circumstances proved are conclusive in nature and they exclude every possible hypothesis except the guilt of accused Dubey and Kamlesh. The chain of evidence in the present case is so complete as not to leave any reasonable ground for the conclusion consistent with the innocence of the accused persons," the court said in its judgment dated December 26.
According to the prosecution, the priest's wife and the victim were involved in a relationship. While the affair started consensually, Kamlesh later told her husband that she was forced to continue the relationship as Shekhar threatened to kill her children.
Kamlesh and Dubey then hatched a plan to kill Shekhar.
The prosecution case was that, on September 25, 2017, Kamlesh lured Shekhar to Delhi on the pretext that her husband was away, mixed sleeping pills in his food and, after he fell unconscious, Kamlesh and Dubey strangulated him to death using a rope.
The body was later set on fire with kerosene and camphor to conceal identity, the court noted.
Medical evidence confirmed the death to be of homicidal nature.
Forensic reports confirmed the presence of kerosene residue near the body and sedatives, corroborating the prosecution version.
The court also relied on call detail records showing frequent contact between the accused and the deceased shortly before the incident, recoveries made at the instance of the accused, and their failure to offer any plausible explanation in their statements.
It said minor lapses such as delay in sending samples to the forensic laboratory or non-joining of public witnesses did not dent the otherwise credible prosecution case.
"In all human probability it was the accused persons who conspired to kill Chander Shekhar, they murdered him and then tried to destroy evidence by burning his body as well as dumping his clothes in a vacant plot", the court said while convicting the couple.
The court will hear arguments on the aspect of quantum of sentence on January 7.
