Additional Sessions Judge Reetesh Singh held 30-year-old Vipin Kumar Saluja, a Delhi resident, guilty of the offences under various sections of the IPC including 302 (murder), 392 (robbery) and 201 (destruction of evidence) and also imposed a fine of Rs 1.4 lakh on him.
Besides Saluja, the court awarded three-year jail term to 27-year-old Sunil Kumar after convicting him for offence under section 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property knowing it to be stolen) of the IPC.
"I find that circumstances which have been established qua Vipin Kumar Saluja are complete and conclusive in nature which point to only one conclusion, which is his guilt," the judge said in the 127-page judgment.
"There is no other explanation to the circumstances established except that it was Saluja who committed the murder of Upender Anand after hiring Toyota Innova vehicle on a false pretext, took away the personal belongings of the deceased and misappropriated the same.....," the court noted.
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Police said while the juvenile had suffered a loss in cricket betting, Kumar, who was running a placement office, had also suffered losses in his business. So both of them along with Saluja planned to loot a vehicle after killing its driver and then sell it through a friend in Madhya Pradesh.
It said that on January 7, 2008, Vipin went to the office of a travel firm here and hired a Toyota Innova vehicle, which was being driven by 25-year-old Upender Anand, on the pretext of going to Mussoorie. On the way, Kumar and the juvenile accused also boarded the vehicle.
It said proprietor of the travel firm lodged a complaint that his driver had not returned from Mussorie. Thereafter, through media report, police got to know that Upender's body had been found at Mussoorie-Dehradun road.
During the probe, the accused were arrested and several robbed articles recovered. Both the accused claimed during the trial that they were falsely implicated.