NEW DELHI: Sharda Jain, former Delhi Councillor, and five other accomplices were on Friday sentenced to rigorous life imprisonment by a city court for the murder of her senior Congress corporator Atma Ram Gupta four years ago.

The court refused the prosecution's plea seeking the gallows for Jain and others saying "the case did not fall in the rarest of rare category".

"Every murder is an act of brutality but every brutality cannot per se call for imposition of the extreme punishment of death penalty," Additional Sessions Judge Bharat Parashar said in his order pronouncing the quantum of sentence in a packed courtroom.

"The prosecution had been unable to show any circumstance that the convicted persons can be termed to be a threat to the society at large and I am of the opinion that by no stretch of imagination, the present case can be put in the category of rarest of rare cases," the judge said in his eight-page order on quantum of sentence.

After hearing the sentence, Jain, 34, expressed her gratitude to the court for not awarding the death penalty.

"Thanks to you, sir, keeping in view the future of my children in mind, you have given me life sentence," Jain, who was also slapped with a fine of Rs 35,000, told the judge.

Besides Jain and her brother Raj Kumar, other four convicts ex-village head of Chajjupur in Ghaziabad Roshan Singh, driver Rajender and hired killers Nirvikar and Puspender were also awarded life term.