A youth has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a Delhi court for murdering his 26-year-old friend after a heated argument over cars.
Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau awarded the jail term to 27-year-old Abhijeet Raj, a Bihar native, and also imposed on him a fine of Rs one lakh which would be given to the family members of deceased Ashish Sharma.
"Now, I would like to draw a balance sheet of aggravating and mitigating factors. The mitigating factors in this case are that convict Abhijeet Raj is a young boy and has no history of any previous criminal involvement.
"The aggravating factors are that deceased Ashish was also a young boy of 26 years. The convict had killed Ashish only because the victim disagreed to him on the quality of cars," the judge said.
The court held that the case does not fall within the category of 'rarest of rare or least even in category of rare case'.
According to the prosecution, on the intervening night of February 26-27, 2012, Abhijeet had murdered Ashish with a knife in Vijay Nagar area near Delhi University here.
All the friends had gathered at their friend Vijay's house where some of them including Abhijeet consumed alcohol. One of the friends was planning to buy a particular car after which a heated discussion started between Abhijeet and Ashish on cars.
Police said they started quarrelling with each other and Abhijeet started abusing Ashish and told him that he had argued with him earlier also, and threatened to kill him.
After intervention of other friends, Ashish and Abhijeet were separated and they all left the room when the neighbours objected to their behaviour, it said.
