Lecturer gets life imprisonment for killing two by sending parcel bomb as wedding gift

A college lecturer was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Bolangir district on Wednesday for killing two persons, including a groom, by sending a parcel bomb as a wedding gift.

- PBD BUREAU/PTI

Punjilal Meher, a lecturer at Jyoti Vikas College in Bhainsa, had a professional enmity with the groom's mother. She was the principal of the college.

Punjilal, was the principal in charge of the college for a few days before the groom's mother Sanjukta Sahoo joined there as the new principal.

Due to this reason, Punjilal hatched the conspiracy to kill her son Soumya and sent the bomb as a wedding gift in 2018, the police said.

Additional District and Sessions Court, Patnagarh, judge Sonali Pattnaik, after examining 62 witnesses, 100 documentary evidence and 51 material objects, has convicted the accused Punjilal Meher (56) and sentenced him to life imprisonment, government counsel Chittaranjan Kanungo said.

The court convicted him under Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 201 (destroy evidence of a crime) of IPC and Sections 3 and 4 of the Explosive Substances Act, he said.

The court sentenced life imprisonment under two sections, 10 years of imprisonment under two charges and seven years imprisonment under another charge. Kanungo said that all the sentences would run concurrently.

"Our submission was to treat it as a rarest of rare cases. However, the court did not observe it as a rarest of rare cases because all heinous crime cases cannot be treated like that," the public prosecutor said.