A district and sessions court in Pune on Wednesday awarded death sentence to a 26-year-old man who brutally killed an elderly woman and later raped her pregnant daughter-in-law in September 2007. Additional sessions judge U.S. Thakre held that the accused Sandesh alias Sainath Kailas Abhang’s act was heinous and deserved nothing less
than capital punishment.
The convict begged for minimum punishment in the case and pleaded in front of the court saying, “My mother wants me to become an ideal citizen and I want to fulfill her wish. She faced lots of ordeals to bring me up, as my father was a drunkard.”
However, the judge while dictating out the punishment observed, “The woman you killed was someone else’s mother. The woman you raped was conceiving a child and she was about to become a mother. You do not know the significance of the word mother”.
Abhang who was working as a mechanic in a garage at Upper Indira Nagar area of Pune had barged into the residence of the victims on the afternoon of September 10, 2007.
He murdered the 75-year-old woman with a sharp weapon and later stripped her daughter-in-law and raped her.
He then stabbed the daughter-in-law 19 times. She was then five months pregnant. Miraculously, the daughter-in-law survived the incident and
also delivered a healthy daughter. She was one of the key witnesses in the case.
Abhang had decamped with jewellery and a mobile phone totally estimated to be worth over Rs 43,500 from their residence. Additional public prosecutor Dhanaji Jadhav pleaded for death sentence calling the act extremely brutal.
The statements of 18 witnesses checked in the case, weapons recovered to commit the offence and bloodstained clothes of
the accused were presented in the court as
evidence.
The victim’s husband hailed the verdict said, “The incident still gives my family nightmares. I see my mother in my daughter. They have been granted justice,” he said.