Mumbai: A Mumbai court on Monday pronounced the quantum of sentence in the Pallavi Purkayastha murder case and awarded life sentence to Sajjad A Mogal, the security guard of the building, who killed the woman lawyer.
The accused, Sajjad A Mogal, 23, was working at Himalayan Heights skyscraper in Wadala in south Mumbai where Pallavi Purkayastha (25) lived at the time of the attack on August 09, 2012.
The police investigations revealed that Mogal, hailing from Jammu and Kashmir and posted as a watchman in the building, used to ogle at Pallavi whenever she passed by. Later, in his statement, Mogal confessed that using a duplicate key, he entered Purkayastha’s flat and attempted to force himself on her.
However, she resisted and started screaming at which he panicked and attacked her with a knife he was carrying, he said in the statement.
Shortly after the ruling, the parents – Atanu Purkayastha, a joint secretary at the Centre when Pallavi was killed, and mother Sunita, who is director-general in the Ministry of Telecommunications – expressed satisfaction with the police investigations and the verdict.
Avik Sengupta, who was one of the witnesses in the case and had deposed in the trial, died of natural causes in November 2013.
Bureau Report
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