Gallows for Yug’s killers
SHIMLA : A local court here on Wednesday awarded death penalty to three men for kidnapping and murdering four-year-old Shimla boy, Yug Gupta, in 2014.
District and sessions judge Virender Singh pronounced the verdict in a jam-packed court awarding capital punishment to all three convicts — Chander Sharma, Tajender Singh and Vikrant Bakshi — for murdering the child after failing to get a ransom of Rs 3.6 crore. While Sharmais a student of law at Himachal Pradesh University, Singh owns a cosmetics shop and Bakshi is an engineering student.
The victim’s parents and grandmother were in tears when the sentence was pronounced. “We finally got justice and my son will now rest in peace,” said Yug’s father Vinod Gupta.
Yug was kidnapped and murdered in the Kelston area of Shimla. A case of abduction under Section 363 of the IPC was registered on June 16, 2014, following which an investigation was initiated. The case was transferred to the criminal investigation department in August 2014 after local police failed to trace the killers.
Yug’s skeletal remains were found inside a water tank in the Kelston locality on August 22, 2016, leading to widespread protests.
The child was tortured, starved and forced to consume liquor before he was thrown into the tank, police said.
Investigators said Sharma, who knew Yug’s father, hatched the conspiracy to kidnap the child for ransom. He lured Yug by offering a chocolate and kidnapped
him on June 14, 2014, from Ram Bazaar area.
He then took him to Singh’s godown just above the shop of Yug’s father. Later, he was bundled into a cardboard box and taken to Sharma’s rented house at Ramchandra Chowk in Singh’s vehicle.