Life term to ex-soldier for murdering doctor

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court has awarded life term to a former soldier for gunning down a doctor of a private hospital in 2012.

Additional sessions j udge Vinod Kumar sentenced former Indian Army sepoy, Dharamendra Kumar Tandan, to imprisonment for life for murdering doctor Sanjiv Dhawan of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.

According to the prosecution, Tandan had got into a quarrel while he was trying to forcibly take away the doctor’s domestic help, whom he said he loved.

The court awarded life term to Tandan, saying he had been “showing criminal bent of mind” even earlier. “The convict had been showing a criminal bent of mind and criminal tendencies even prior to the offence in question,” it observed.

The prosecution said that the former soldier, who had retired from service in 2010, was living with a woman named Sangeeta who was working as a domestic maid at the victim’s residence in New Rajinder Nagar in central Delhi.

On September 18, 2012, Tandan asked the doctor to send Sangeeta and threatened to kill him otherwise, the prosecution alleged. The convict reached the house of the victim at night and trespassed into a neighbour’s floor with a double-barrel gun, creating terror while trying to find her.

Tandan allegedly attacked the neighbour and attempted to kill him with an axe. He fired a couple of shots, of which one critically hit Dhawan and killed him.

The prosecution said Sangeeta had left Tandan after which he used to often indulge in scuffles with her landlord in whose house she was a tenant. It also claimed that he was imprisoned in Tihar Jail for one such incident.