Kolkata, Dec 22 (IANS) A district court in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district on Monday convicted 13 persons for the murder of Hargobindo Das and his son Chandan Das amid a communal riot-like situation that broke out in April during protests against the Waqf (Amendment) Act.
The district court at Murshidabad’s Jangipur will pronounce the sentence for these 13 convicts on Tuesday.
The sentence will be pronounced nearly nine months after the murder of the father and the son on April 12.
The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the state police had arrested the 13 currently convicted persons one after another.
Earlier this year, the SIT submitted a 900-page charge sheet in the matter.
In the charge sheet, it was mentioned that the father and the son were killed while they tried to prevent riots within the village.
The SIT also termed the attack “pre-planned”.
The family members of the deceased father and the son rejected the compensation offer from the Trinamool Congress-led state government. However, they accepted the compensation offered to them by the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari.
In April this year, the Calcutta High Court, while directing the formation of the SIT to investigate the Murshidabad riots, also ordered the deployment of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) there.
A division bench of Justice Soumen Sen and Justice Raja Basu Chowdhury also said that the measures taken by the West Bengal government to control communal unrest were inadequate, and had the CAPF been deployed earlier, the situation would not have been so “grave” and “volatile”.
It also said that, besides paying compensation to the families where violence-related deaths have occurred, the state administration should ensure that normal functioning at different schools in the sensitive zone is not affected.
–IANS
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