INDIA: DEATH PENALTY FOR 15 MEMBERS OF BANNED PFI FOR KERALA BJP LEADER'S MURDER

January 30, 2024:

A Kerala court on January 30, 2024 sentenced to death 15 persons associated with the now-banned Islamist outfit Popular Front of India (PFI) in connection with the murder of Bharatiya Janata Party OBC wing leader Ranjith Sreenivasan in Alappuzha district in December 2021.
The sentence was pronounced by Mavelikkara additional district judge VG Sreedevi, news agency PTI reported.
The prosecution had sought the maximum sentence for the convicts, saying that they were a “trained killer squad” and the cruel and diabolical manner in which the victim was killed in front of his mother, infant, and wife brings it within the ambit of the "rarest of the rarest" of crimes.
Ranjith Sreenivasan, the BJP OBC Morcha state secretary, was brutally attacked and killed in his home on December 19, 2021, in front of his family, allegedly by activists affiliated with PFI and Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).
The court on January 20 had found that out of the 15 people accused in the case, one to eight were directly involved in the case. It had also found four people (accused number nine to 12) guilty of murder because they, along with those directly involved in the crime, came to the spot armed with deadly weapons.
Their objective was to prevent Sreenivasan from escaping and stop anyone entering the house after hearing his screams. The court had accepted the prosecution's argument that they were also liable for the common offence of murder under IPC Section 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object).
The court also convicted for murder three others (accused number 13 to 15) who had hatched the conspiracy to kill Sreenivasan, the SPP had said.
The BJP leader's murder occurred just hours after SDPI leader KS Shan was killed by a gang on the night of December 18, 2021, while he was returning home in Alappuzha.