Police escort Ajay Kumar Pal to Hazat after the court pronounced the death sentence. Picture by Manik Bose

Ranchi, April 9: No sooner had Ajay Kumar Pal been given the death sentence for burning five persons alive while they were a sleep at a Bariatu house, tears rolled down the cheeks of Sanjeev Kumar.

“Finally justice is done. This is the judgment for which I was waiting since my sister was killed,” he was heard saying when the special CBI judge Numan Ali pronounced the verdict in a packed courtroom around 11.30 this morning.

Sanjeev, the brother-in-law of Dhirendra Kumar, special secretary of the industry department, recovered the partially-burnt body of his sister Amita Sinha (41) with bodies of her son Harshit (10), nephew Anmol (10), niece Golu (8) and servant Kittu (15), when Dhirendra was away in Bangalore on June 2, 2003.

However, Dhirendra, who was a forest officer then, was not present on the occasion.

Pal, 25, was looking calm after the pronouncement. “I am innocent. I have been falsely implicated in the case. I will make an appeal before the high court,” he was heard saying in a low pitch when mediapersons asked him about his reaction to the judgment.

The court had convicted Pal on April 5 this year. The case was handed over to the CBI in April 2004 after Dhirendra was not satisfied with the state police investigation and had suspected some big hands behind the killing.

However, there was no change in the findings. Both the investigation reports charged Pal — a resident of Vamini village in Jhalda in Bengal’s Purulia district — with the murder.

Among those present at the court were well-wishers of the forest officer’s family, including Lotan Choudhary, a local BJP leader, Gulshan Munjal, a garment dealer and Butter Deol, a businessman.

Prosecution lawyer Shiv Kumar Kaka said it was a “rarest of rare murder case” in which frayed nerves over a badly cooked dinner triggered a vendetta chain that cost a family of five members.

Defence lawyer Rohit Ranjan said his client Pal was innocent. “He was convicted on the basis of his extra judicial confession. Prosecution could not give a strong motive behind the incident. Besides, it also failed to give any direct evidence supporting the commitment of crime by my client. Above all, Kumar was not questioned in court,” the defence lawyer said.