The Supreme Court on Monday sentenced Vikas Yadav and Vishal Yadav to 25 years in prison in connection with the 2002 Nitish Katara murder case. The bench of Justice Dipak Misra and Justice C Nagappan also gave a 20-year sentence to their aide Sukhdev Pehalwan.
The order is a revision of the Delhi High Court’s 2014 ruling that extended the trio’s life term to 30 years. Vikas Yadav and Vishal Yadav had appealed against the high court order that had termed the murder an honour killing and extended their life term to 25 years in jail. The order had also added five more years to their sentences for destruction of evidence.
Although it was considered a 'rarest of rare' crime, they were not sentenced to death because the court believed that the trio were not beyond reformation. The three were first given a life term by a lower court in 2008.
Vikas Yadav had planned 25-year-old Katara’s killing because he opposed the victim's relationship with his sister and Uttar Pradesh politician DP Yadav’s daughter Bharti. According to the high court ruling, the murder was "very carefully planned and premeditated with "extreme vengeance". Katara, a business executive and the son of a railway officer, was abducted and burnt to death in Ghaziabad on February 16, 2002.
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