Man Gets Life Term For Killing 2 Chief Medical Officers In Lucknow

A special CBI court in Lucknow on Wednesday sentenced a man to life imprisonment for killing two chief medical officers of the Uttar Pradesh family welfare department in 2010 and 2011, officials said.

The court also imposed a fine of Rs 58,000 on the convict Anand Prakash Tiwari who was hired by Y S Sachan, the then deputy CMO in the UP family welfare department. Two other accused in the case, Vinod Sharma and R K Verma, were acquitted by the court for lack of evidence.

The CBI had claimed that various issues related to the alleged expenditure of NRHM funds were the motive behind the killings.

Chief Medical Officers V K Arya and B P Singh were killed while on a morning walk in the posh Gomti Nagar area of Lucknow in 2010 and 2011, respectively. They were shot dead by bike-borne assailants six months apart -- October 27, 2010, and April 2, 2011.

It was alleged that Sachan had hired "contract killers", including Anand Prakash Tiwari, to eliminate Arya and Singh, a CBI spokesperson said in a statement.

"In both the cases, investigation by the local police had found involvement of Y S Sachan. However, he was not charge-sheeted due to his death during the investigation," the statement said.

Sachan was found dead in Lucknow prison toilet on June 22, 2011, with deep cuts on his hand. The CBI, which probed his death, had filed a closure report claiming he had committed suicide.

The agency had said although there were deep cuts, there was "no injury on inaccessible parts" and there were no cuts on his clothes.

During the course of an investigation into the killings of the two CMOs, the CBI examined 45 prosecution witnesses, exhibited various documents and cross-examined four defence witnesses.

After filing the charge sheet in 2012, the CBI had said, "Sachan conspired with others and hired two shooters through a contractor, all based in Uttar Pradesh." "The accused got emboldened after V K Arya's murder as the actual killers were not detected by local police at the relevant period and they indulged in the second murder. Same weapons have been used by the killers in both murders," the CBI had said in a statement.

The CBI investigation of these cases revealed that the motive behind the killing of Arya and B P Singh was because of various issues relating to the alleged expenditure of NRHM funds, it had said.

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