New Delhi, Aug 12: The Supreme Court on Monday granted bail to Shubha Shankaranarayan (32), who was found guilty of murdering her fiancé B V Girish, a software engineer, in 2003 along with three others, to kill her fiancé B V Girish in Bangalore in 2003.
Shubha, who is a law graduate, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the trial court in 2010 after being held guilty in the murder case. The Karnataka High Court confirmed her conviction and sentence in 2010.
Taking up her bail plea, a bench of Justices Dipak Misra and V Gopala Gowda noted that the accused has been in custody for more than 52 months.
Since it would take further time to hear her appeal challenging the conviction and sentence, there was no point in putting her behind bars, the court said, while granting her bail.
According to the police, Shubha was the mastermind and the prime accused in the murder of Girish, a software engineer, to whom she was engaged in November 2003. They were to be married five months later.
Her alleged boyfriend Arun Verma, her junior in B M S College of Law, his cousin Dinakar alias Dinesh and Venkatesh are the co-accused. All of them were also sentenced to life term by the trial court.
A murder that shook Bangalore
It was a well-planned murder, executed to precision on December 3, 2003. Seven years later, law student Shubha Shankaranarayan was sentenced to life imprisonment by a fast track court in July 2010 for killing her fiance BV Girish.
The victim, Girish, 27, was a software engineer with Intel and got engaged to Shubha, then 21 and a final-year student of BMS College of Law, on November 30, 2003. The wedding was fixed for April 11, 2004. The two families were neighbours in Banashankari II Stage knew each other for 15 years.
Four days later, on December 3, 2003, Shubha convinced Girish to take her out for dinner and made him stop his bike near the Jumbo point on Ring Road, between Indiranagar and Koramangala, on the pretext of wanting to watch aircraft take off and land at the HAL Airport.
While Girish was busy watching an aircraft in motion, a man attacked him with a blunt object from behind and sped away on a bike that was waiting for him.
Shubha took Girish to Manipal Hospital, where he succumbed. In her complaint, Shubha said an unidentified man assaulted her fiance and fled.
Not convinced with her version, police collected call details of her mobile phone, prior to and after Girish's murder that night. Records showed numerous calls made to a number belonging to Arun Verma, then 19 and Shubha's junior in college.
Cops picked up Arun and confronted him with the evidence. He confessed to the murder and, based on his statement, Shubha, and two others, Venkatesh and Dinakar, were arrested.
Investigations revealed Shubha was in love with Arun and was engaged to Girish against her will. The lovebirds then hatched a plan to eliminate Girish. Arun hired Venkatesh to kill Girish; his cousin Dinakar helped him plan the murder.
A sessions court held all four guilty of murder, and sentenced them to life term in jail. The Karnataka high court upheld the judgment.
"Though the prosecution has not placed any evidence as to the actual conversation that had taken place between the accused, the call details, call history sheets extracted in this judgment would clearly indicate that they were in close association with each other. The accused had entered into a criminal conspiracy to do away with the deceased, and they were co-conspirators. The conduct of the accused before the incident, at the time of incident and after the incident is compatible with their guilt and incompatible with their innocence, and no other hypothesis except hypothesis of guilt of accused can be drawn," the high court had observed.
Comments
Add new comment