‘How can they bear a child after snatching someone’s son?’

HOSHIARPUR - “How can they think of bearing a child after snatching someone else’s son?” This is the question the angry and weeping mother of 16-year-old Abhi Verma is asking about the couple who killed her son and have now approached court for conjugal rights to bear a child.

Jasbir Singh and Sonia were sentenced to death, along with their accomplice Vikram Walia, by the district and sessions court here in December 2006 for the cold-blooded murder of Abhi Verma.

Jasbir and Vikram face the gallows as capital punishment against them was upheld by the high court and Supreme Court. But the apex court reduced the sentence of Sonia, who had been tutor of the victim, to life imprisonment.

Jasbir and Sonia had been married for eight months when they committed the crime. They have approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court to seek conjugal rights in order to have a child.

Abhi’s mother Anita said: “This is shameful and a rude shock for us. How can they think of bearing a child after snatching someone else’s son?”

“We have come to know that the culprits have filed a petition in the high court through their father, seeking conjugal rights to have a child. We will fight it tooth and nail,” Ravi Verma, Abhi’s father and a local businessman, told IANS.

Jasbir Singh’s father, Jarnail Singh, submitted a plea before the high court in Chandigarh in the first week of April, seeking conjugal rights for his son and daughter-in-law, lodged in the Patiala central prison.

The petition said giving conjugal rights to the convicted couple would give the family a heir since he (Jarnail Singh) did not have any other son except Jasbir.

But Abhi’s father said: “Abhi too was our only son. They killed the innocent boy. Now they want their family tree to continue. They deserve no mercy.”

The sensational kidnapping and subsequent murder of Abhi, nicknamed Harry, in February 2005 had shocked the town and resulted in violence. He was kidnapped on his way to school.

Abhi’s kidnappers had demanded a ransom of Rs.50 lakh from his family and even as negotiations were on, his naked body was dumped near Adampur town, 20 km from Hoshiarpur.

Vikram, who master-minded the kidnapping and knew Abhi’s family closely, even met his father after the kidnapping to know what was happening in the boy’s home.

Police, who tracked the boy’s kidnappers to an isolated house on the outskirts of the town, could only recover his body later from another spot. He had already died after his abductors injected an overdose of a tranquiliser into him.

They dumped his body but continued the ransom drama till police caught up with them.