New Delhi: Sher Singh Rana, convicted for the murder of Samajwadi Party MP Phoolan Devi, has been sentenced to life imprisonment and a fine of Rs 1 lakh by a Delhi court on Thursday. Prosecution lawyer Manisha Sharma said that the court did not find the case rarest of rare and that is why he was not sent to gallows.
Sher Singh Rana was convicted under Section 302 and Section 307 of the Indian Penel Code for killing Phoolan Devi in 2001 in New Delhi. But Rana was acquitted of perjury, Arms Act and criminal conspiracy. Ten others charged in the case were acquitted.
Rana killed Phoolan Devi to avenge the 1981 Behmai massacre in 2001. He surrendered before the police after the crime. However, in 2004, he fled from Delhi's Tihar Jail and reached Kandahar in Afghanistan from where he bought the relics of Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan.
In 2006, he was arrested from Kolkata and brought back to New Delhi.
Phoolan Devi was a Samajwadi Party MP from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh and was shot dead around 1.30 pm on July 25, 2001. She was killed at the gate of her official residence at 44, Ashoka Road, in the highly secured New Delhi district.
During the trial, the court recorded the testimony of 171 prosecution witnesses. Investigations suffered a major setback when Rana managed to flee from Tihar Jail on February 17, 2004.
He was finally nabbed on April, 2006 by the Special Cell team in Kolkata and was brought to Delhi. Out of the 12 accused chargesheeted for Phoolan's murder by the Crime Branch, Keshav Chauhan, Amit Rathi and Praveen Mittal were granted bail in 2009. One of them named Pradeep died of heart attack in Tihar Jail in November 2013.
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