Eight sentenced in murder case

A special court here today awarded double life sentence to eight persons for the brutal murder of the vice president of a leading company in Periyanaickenpalayam six years ago.
Judge Srinivasan of Special Court, Bomb Blasts Cases, sentenced the eight while acquitting 19 others.
Those sentenced are Manivannan, Ramamurthy, Rajendran, Sivakumar, Saravanan, Gunapalan, Velmurugan and Sampathkumar.
The judge also ordered the convicts to undergo another five years imprisonment for assault and imposed a fine of Rs 2,000 each.
The sentences will run concurrently.
The prosecution case was that a group of 27 persons had trespassed into Pricol company and entered into the room of vice president Roy George, who was looking after the HR department, on September 21, 2009.

They then assaulted George with iron rods, believing that he was instrumental in the dismissal of 42 labourers of the company's Malumichampatti unit, resulting in his death.

While deciding the case, the court relied on testimonies
of four police constables, who were eye witnesses to the incident, and said in such a case, motive of crime was "irrelevant".
The constables had deposed that the accused had fired on constable Dinesh from another cop's service self-loading rifle. They also said the rifle's safety catch was on, which meant that a bullet could be fired after pulling the trigger unless it was tampered with.

The court accepted the statements of the witnesses, saying "Motive is irrelevant in a case based on the version of eye witness. In the present case, there are at least four eye witnesses of the crime... Therefore, it was not incumbent upon the prosecution to prove motive in the present case."
During the trial, the accused pleaded not guilty and also contended that the rifle fired accidentally when he was keeping the weapon aside.