Court grants life sentence to 11 for Gulberg society massacre

A total of 69 people, including former Congress MP Eshan Jafri were burnt alive in the 2002 post-Godhra violence. Rejecting the demand for death sentence for all the convicts, the court said life imprisonment for the 11 will be till death if the state does not exercise power to remit the sentence. The court awarded 10year jail term to one of the 13 convicted for lesser offences while 12 others have been given seven-year sentence each.

The prosecution had argued that all the 24 convicts should be given death penalty. While describing the massacre as the darkest day in the history of civil society, special court Judge P B Desai refused death penalty saying, “If you look at all aspects, no previous antecedent has been placed on record.”

Life term should have been given to all convicts: Zakia 

Voicing dissatisfaction over the court verdict in the Gulberg massacre case, Zakia Jafri, the wife of slain Congress leader Ehsan Jafri, on Friday said life sentence should have been awarded to all the convicts. 

However, her son Tanvi Jafri said there was definitely ‘some sense of closure’ at the convictions but it would have to be seen why some of the accused were not convicted. “We will definitely contest in the High Court some of the acquittals,” he said. 

Zakia, the wife of the former MP, clearly expressed her ‘dissatisfaction’ with the verdict saying that she had seen the violent crime and felt that life sentence should have been awarded to all the accused and not some of them. Tanvi said a message should go out to the nation that the law will not tolerate such things. 

Tanvi also felt that there was strong evidence in favour of a conspiracy angle in the Gulberg case like the incident at Naroda Patiya.