Mumbai: A Mumbai Sessions Court on Friday awarded death sentence to Parvez Tak for the sensational killing of his step-daughter and actress Laila Khan, her mother, three siblings, and a cousin sister in 2011.
Additional Sessions Judge S.B. Pawar pronounced Tak guilty of the multiple murders on May 9, and the verdict on the quantum of punishment was delivered on Friday.
Tak — a resident of Jammu & Kashmir and harbouring links with the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba — was the third husband of Selina Patel, Laila’s mother, and has been found guilty of the gory six murders, destruction of evidence, and other offences.
Following a brawl over a property dispute, Tak had killed Selina and her four children, plus a niece, at their farmhouse in the popular hill-station of Igatpuri in Nashik, on February 7, 2011, and buried their bodies in the bungalow gardens before absconding.
The children were killed because they had witnessed Tak murdering Selina, as per the probe, and the entire family was reported ‘missing’ since February 7, 2011.
The killings came to light after some 18 months when J&K Police arrested Tak in a forgery case on July 8, 2012, and during the investigation, he revealed the ghastly crime of killing half-a-dozen of his family members.
After the J&K Police informed Maharashtra Police, a search was carried out in Tak’s presence at the farmhouse on July 18, 2012 and the investigators dug up the skeletal remains of the six victims buried in the garden.
Besides Selina (51) and Laila (30), the others killed were Azmina Khan (32), twins Imran Khan (25) and Zara Khan (25), and their cousin sister Reshma Khan (22).
Terming it “a rarest of rare cases” in which 40 witnesses were examined during the 12-year-long trial, Public Prosecutor Pankaj Chavan said that Tak first killed his wife Selina and then killed the five children, in cold blood for which he deserved death penalty.
In the 984-page chargesheet filed in the case, the police had invoked charges pertaining to murder, kidnapping, robbery, conspiracy, and destruction of evidence.
The actress was born as Reshma Patel but later adopted the screen name of Laila Khan, starting her film career with a Kannada film “Makeup” (2002), and then appeared in a few Bollywood films, including “Wafaa: A Deadly Love Story” (2008), opposite the late superstar Rajesh Khanna.
After Laila and her family abruptly went missing in February 2011, her biological father Nadir Patel (Selina’s first husband), had approached the police for help amid a huge hue and cry.
Nadir Patel had named his ex-wife’s second husband Asif Shaikh, who is still absconding and the third husband Parvez Tak who has been slapped with a death penalty.
In the long-winding investigations, the police probed many theories and conspiracies but the case was finally cracked after it emerged that the actress’ phone was last active in Igatpuri before the family just ‘disappeared’ into oblivion.
–IANS