Former Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who was convicted in a rape case and sentenced to life imprisonment, has now been found guilty of the custodial death of the rape victim's father.
Sengar is among seven accused who have been convicted on charges of culpable homicide by a local court in Delhi.
The district judge said that Sengar had no intention of killing the rape victim's father, who died in judicial custody in April 2018.
"He was beaten in a brutal manner which led to his death", the judge said.
The now-deceased was beaten and arrested when he, along with his co-worker, was returning to his village and had an altercation with a friend of Sengar’s brother.
According to the charge sheet, Sengar was in touch with the police the whole time and later talked to the doctor who examined the man.
Police claimed that the cause of his death was “blood poisoning due to perforation of colon”.
Charges were brought against Kuldeep Sengar, his brother Atul, Makhi police station in-charge Ashok Singh Bhadauria, sub-inspector Kamta Prasad, constable Amir Khan, and six others.
The case was transferred to Delhi from a trial court in Uttar Pradesh on the Supreme Court's directions in August last year. The case grabbed media headlines in 2018 after the rape victim attempted suicide outside state chief Yogi Adityanath’s residence in Lucknow. In December 2019, the court sent Sengar to jail for raping the woman in 2017, when she was a minor. Sengar is also charged with the killing of the lawyer and aunt of the victim in an orchestrated truck accident.
