The high court on Friday upheld the life sentence awarded to three associates of Dubai don Aftab Ansari for the abduction of Khadim’s owner Partha Pratim Roy Burman in 2001.

In a brief order, the division bench of Justice Nisitha Mahtre and Justice Tapas Kumar Mukherjee said the appeal moved by Abdur Rahman Kunji, Shaoukat Hossein and Akib Ali was being rejected and the trial court order sentencing the trio to jail for life upheld.

An Alipore court had sentenced the three, along with Ansari and another accused, named Happy Singh, to life imprisonment in 2009.

Ansari did not appeal against the order. Singh did but he was bludgeoned to death by an apparently deranged inmate of Presidency jail in May while the appeal was pending.

After Friday’s judgment, Jayanta Narayan Chatterjee, counsel for the convicts, said: “My clients will challenge the high court order in the Supreme Court.”

Footwear baron Partha Pratim Roy Burman had been abducted on July 25, 2001, while he was headed for his company’s factory in the Tiljala area. Some of the convicts were waiting at an intersection for his Tata Safari. They fired two shots, dragged him out of his vehicle and whisked him away in a Maruti 800. According to the CID, Roy Burman was freed after Ansari received Rs 3.75 crore, as part of a ransom, in Dubai. Roy Burman returned home to Salt Lake on August 2, 2001.

On July 7, 2005, Roy Burman was declared hostile during the trial in the court of an additional sessions judge in Alipore. In his 100-page order on September 17, 2005, judge Bishwarup Bandyopadhyay had said the Khadim’s group had paid a “few crores” to Ansari to secure Roy Burman’s release.

After accessing email interactions between Ansari and others in the gang, the investigators had come to the conclusion that the Dubai-based don had collected Rs 3.75 crore from Sidhartha Roy Burman, brother of Partha Pratim. The money, according to the sleuths, was sent to Dubai through hawala.

Ansari and another associate had also been convicted in the American Center attack case and are undergoing life imprisonment.

Investigators have found that Roy Burman was abducted to collect money for buying arms to attack the American Center.

Seventeen accused in the abduction case had been acquitted for want of evidence.