Servant from Ahmedabad sentenced to death for murdering family in Dubai

A domestic help who murdered his employer and four others of his family in Dubai in 1992 has been sentenced to death by a special CBI court on Thursday. CBI sessions judge RM Parmar sent the accused Ravji Pawar to the gallows as according to him the case fell in the ‘rarest of the rare’ category.

Moreover Pawar had also attempted to rape his employer Ramesh Sagar’s daughter Jyoti and had sexual intercourse with his wife Rajori after killing her.

The incident happened in January 4, 1992, at Karama in Dubai where the Indian origin Sagar family was residing. On that fateful day, Jyoti returned from school and was changing her clothes, when Pawar, who had been the family servant since 1980, attempted to rape her. When she resisted, he killed her. When Jyoti’s mother Rajori, 38, discovered this, he also killed her. He then had sexual intercourse with her. After this, he went on to kill Jyoti’s 12-year-old brother Jayesh, her father Ramesh, 40, and her grandmother Muliben.

After the crime, Pawar fled for his hometown Chikhli near Navsari the same day.

He was later nabbed by the local police on January 8 based on the testimony of Pawar’s close friend, Chinu Rayubhai. Rayubhai had, in his statement, said that when he asked Pawar about his sudden return from Dubai, he confessed to committing the murder and rape.

The court accepted Rayubhai’s statement as the ‘extra judicial confession’ by Pawar.

The crime branch had filed the first chargesheet in the case in April 5, 1995. At that time Pawar had then been booked only for murder. However, the case was subsequently handed over to CBI on April 27, whereby the agency after conducting the medical tests booked him for rape and theft too.

The prosecution advocate LD Tiwari, argued that the accused had first raped the two women, eliminated the entire family and then escaped with valuables. Tiwari had sought death sentence as the maximum punishment.

However, defence advocate Mehul Shrivastav contended that there was no evidence to suggest that Pawar was guilty and the post-mortem reports found that the girl was still a virgin and her mother was not raped by the accused. He pleaded that the accused be released as he has already completed 19 years of imprisonment without trial.

The death sentence will be subject to confirmation from the Gujarat high court.