A Mumbai sessions court has found artist Chintan Upadhyay guilty of conspiring to murder his estranged wife Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Haresh Bhambhani, as well as abetting their murder. The court will hear arguments on the sentencing on Saturday. Three other individuals, Vijay Rajbhar, Pradeep Rajbhar, and Shivkumar Rajbhar, were convicted of murder under the Indian Penal Code. Prosecutors plan to seek the maximum punishment of death for all the convicts. Upadhyay, who was out on bail, has been sent to judicial custody until Saturday.
Special public prosecutor Vaibhav Bagade stated that he would seek capital punishment due to Bhambhani being a lawyer, and the recent cases of assault on lawyers make this crime fall into the “rarest of rare” category. Bhambhani’s brothers expressed their desire for death sentences for the convicts, mentioning the suffering their family has endured since his murder.
During the trial, around 50 witnesses were examined, and the prosecution argued that Upadhyay was the mastermind behind the conspiracy driven by his hatred towards his wife and her lawyer. A chain of circumstances was proven against all the accused.
Hema Upadhyay and Haresh Bhambhani were killed on December 11, 2015. Their bodies were found stuffed in cardboard boxes and dumped in a ditch in suburban Kandivali. The accused Vidyadhar Rajbhar, who allegedly executed the murders, remains at large.
Chintan Upadhyay was arrested shortly after the murders but was granted bail by the Supreme Court in September 2021 after spending nearly six years in jail. He claimed that the police falsely implicated him in the case due to his ongoing marital dispute with Hema. The defense argued that Chintan had no reason to want to harm his wife, and that a confession obtained from co-accused Pradeep Rajbhar was coerced by the police.
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