Srinagar: Sajjad Mughal, the security guard who had killed 25-year-old lawyer Pallavi Purkayastha in her Mumbai flat five years ago, was arrested from the Srinagar-Leh highway on Tuesday, more than a year after he jumped parole and went missing.
Police said they had received inputs that Mughal may be hiding near his hometown in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir. He was picked up by the state police and will be transferred to Maharashtra, officials said.
Speaking to CNN-News18, Pallavi’s father Atanu Purkayastha, expressed his gratitude to police and demanded that Mughal’s sentence should be changed from life imprisonment to death now. “The last year has been a very difficult time for us. But justice has not been done till now. He should be hanged,” he said.
Mughal, who was lodged in Nashik Central Jail, had been granted parole in February 2016 after he filed an application saying that his mother was unwell. He was allowed to travel to Kashmir on the condition that he would report to the local police station. He never returned.
His parole was set to end in March, but he sought an extension of two months. However, he did not return even in May, after which a complaint was filed. Investigations later revealed that soon after reaching his hometown, Mughal had skipped parole. Special teams were sent to Kashmir to re-arrest him, but he remained untraceable for over 18 months.
The news of his disappearance had caused a furore all over and opened a can of worms for the police jail machinery, with questions being raised on the procedure for granting furloughs to convicts. The then prison superintendent of Nashik prison, BK Upadhyaya, was eventually suspended by the state government.
It had also led to an overhaul in the parole system, with the Devendra Fadnavis government banning parole for rapists and murder convicts. The number of days of parole was also reduced from 90 to 46 days.
Pallavi, the daughter of a Delhi-based IAS officer, was murdered in her 16th-floor apartment in Wadala on August 9, 2012. Mogul, who was employed as a watchman in the building, had managed to get a duplicate key of the main door of Pallavi's house where she lived with her fiance, Avik Sengupta.
He tried to rape Pallavi, but stabbed her multiple times and slit her throat when she fought back.
A session’s court had found him guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment in 2014. The autopsy report, the murder weapon, Moghul’s bloodstained clothes, call records and DNA samples had nailed his crime.
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