New Delhi, Oct. 29: Defence minister A.K. Antony followed the Supreme Court’s guidelines on the death sentence in deciding on an army court martial that gave the ultimate punishment to a soldier for killing a superior officer, a senior ministry official said today.

Antony decided that evidence against the soldier alleged to have killed his superior did not merit the death sentence and commuted the verdict to life imprisonment.

“The Supreme Court has laid down that the death sentence should be given only in the ‘rarest of the rare’ cases,” the official said. “In our view, these cases were not deemed as fitting into that category.”

Defence secretary Vijay Singh told The Telegraph that army headquarters also concurred with this view.

Despite the finding of the court martial, army headquarters found that there was not enough evidence to justify giving the death sentence to Sepoy Suresh Chandra Behera or Sepoy Satyam Kumar for having killed their seniors.

The defence minister took the recommendation of army headquarters while commuting their sentences, a senior official said.

On February 26, 2007, an army Summary General Court Martial sentenced Behera of the 28 Rashtriya Rifles to death for killing his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Saket Saxena. The incident took place at Harwan on the outskirts of Srinagar on the night of October 31, 2006.

Again on May 18, 2007, another Summary General Court Martial sentenced to death Sepoy Satyam Kumar of a Northern Command signals unit for killing his superior, Havilder Padmarajan, on October 28, 2006.

Last week, a parliamentary standing committee report said the military establishment was not taking reports of suicides and fratricides seriously enough. The standing committee on defence, which presented its 31st report on “stress management in the armed forces”, said 635 soldier suicides were reported between 2003 and 2007.

In addition, it found 67 “fratricidal killings”, the military jargon to describe soldiers killing colleagues and seniors.

The “alarming trend of suicides and fratricidal killings in the armed forces”, the committee said, “is attributable to increased stress environment leading to psychological imbalance in the soldiers”.