A Delhi court has sentenced a man to life imprisonment for killing a Belgian embassy employee at her residence here in 2006, relying on her son's testimony.
Additional Sessions Judge Rajeev Bansal handed down the jail term to Vijay Pal, who was employed as the driver of victim Isabelle Dessoy, personal secretary to the Ambassador of Belgium, for the offence of murder under section 302 of the IPC.
"The prosecution has succeeded in proving that Isabelle was murdered by Pal," the judge said, while relying on her son's testimony.
"Although there is no eyewitness to the offence but son of the victim claims to have heard the cries of his mother and voice of the accused on mobile.
"It is thus not a case, which is totally based on circumstantial evidence. The evidence of the son of the victim is very material," the judge said.
The court had also relied on the postmortem report of the victim which proved that that the iron piece recovered from the woman's body was actually the tip of the knife which was used by the driver.
The blood stains lifted from the spot and Pal's car also matched his blood group.
Isabelle was residing at Vasant Vihar in south Delhi since February 2006 along with her teenaged son.
According to prosecution, on the night of September 23, she was stabbed by Pal at her residence.
According to her son's testimony, earlier in the day, Isabelle had a fight with Pal when she was returning home in the car, after swimming at a resort in Kapashera. She had got down from the car midway and reached home alone in a taxi.
He added that, on reaching home his mother told him about the quarrel saying that the driver was "behaving in a very crazy manner and was driving the car at a high speed".
He, further, said that she told him that when she was boarding the taxi to get home, "her driver tried to drag her into his car".
Pal, however, denied the allegations and claimed that the woman had been murdered by her son as he opposed his (Pal's) proximity to his mother. He added that after killing his mother, her son called him up asking him to reach their house in order to falsely implicate him.
While rejecting the contentions of Pal, the court said, "The accused has very cleverly tried to project a picture that he was not present at the spot at the time when the murder took place," adding that he had "fabricated" the story to save himself.
