Thirteen years after the gruesome killing of Mumbai lawyer Pallavi Purkayastha, the Bombay High Court on Monday upheld the conviction and life imprisonment of security guard Sajjad Mugal Pathan, rejecting appeals seeking enhancement of his sentence to the death penalty.

A division bench of Justices A.S. Gadkari and Neela Gokhale held that the prosecution had “established the guilt of the convict beyond all reasonable doubt” and found “no infirmity” in the trial court’s 2015 judgment sentencing Pathan to life imprisonment for the 2012 crime.

“In all human probability, the act of murder of the deceased is done by Sajjad,” the bench observed, adding that the evidence clearly established a complete chain of circumstances linking the accused to the crime. The court also accepted the veracity

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