Sabrina Lall, who fought an unrelenting battle to seek justice for her murdered sister Jessica Lall, died on Sunday evening, PTI reported. She was 53.
“She was not keeping well and had been in and out of the hospital,” her brother Ranjith told the news agency. “Yesterday [Saturday], her condition deteriorated at home and we took her to hospital. Today, in the evening, she passed away.”
Model Jessica Lall was shot dead on April 30, 1999, at a pub in Delhi where she worked as a barmaid after she refused to serve alcohol to the son of former Union minister Venod Sharma because the bar was closed. Manu Sharma alias Siddharth Vashisht was identified as the killer.
After a prolonged legal battle that Sabrina Lall fought, the Delhi High Court had sentenced Sharma to life imprisonment in December 2006. The Supreme Court had upheld the verdict in April 2010. Sharma walked out of Tihar jail in 2020 after the Delhi Sentence Review Board recommended his early release.
In 2018, Sabrina Lall had said that she has no objection to Sharma’s release. “It will be like catharsis to forgive and move on,” she had written in her letter to the welfare office of Tihar Jail. “I also need to get on with my life.”
After Sharma’s release, Sabrina Lall had said that she had forgiven him. “I really do not have anything to say,” she had told PTI. “I am not feeling anything. I feel numb. The only thing I hope and pray to God is that he never thinks of repeating that mistake again.”
In an interview to PTI in 2020, Sabrina Lall had spoken about her plans to launch a foundation in memory of her sister to help women in similar situations get justice.
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