Dubai: Seven severed bodies of a family, a seven-week pregnancy, and a lover who couldn’t make it to Grade 7 in school.
That is the essence of the diabolical Amroha murders from 2008 that has set the stage for the first woman to be executed in independent India.
The 13-year case of Shabnam Ali, from the sleepy hamlet of Bawankhedi in western Uttar Pradesh’s Amroha, and her boyfriend Saleem, has cleared a final hurdle with her review mercy petition against the death penalty being rejected by the Indian President — setting the stage for her hanging in the state’s Mathura jail, India’s only prison with an execution room for women.
Shabnam — currently lodged in Rampur district jail, and Saleem — who is in Agra prison, have been convicted of murdering the former’s entire family on April 15, 2008, including a 10-month-old child, over the family’s strong objection to their marriage. The duo were convicted and awarded death sentence for the multiple murders by a sessions court and the Allahabad High Court before the Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2015, following which Shabnam had filed the mercy petition before the President.
Usman Saifi, a Bulandshahr-based journalist and the custodian of Shabnam’s son, told Gulf News on Thursday that the prison administration in Rampur and Mathura had started preparations for the execution of both Shabnam and Saleem, although no date has been fixed yet.
Rampur jailer Rakesh Kumar Verma told news agencies that they have requested the Amroha administration to obtain Shabnam’s death warrant, after which she will be transferred to Mathura district jail for the execution.
THE CASE
Shabnam, a double MA in English and Geography, grew up in what was known as the most-educated family in the entire administrative division of Hasanpur, of which her village is a part. Her father Shaukat Ali, 55, was an art teacher at Taharpur Intermediate College, his eldest son Anees was an engineer in Jalandhar, and Shabnam’s younger brother Rashid was a B. Tech student. Shabnam herself was a teacher at a local primary school, whereas Saleem was a Grade 6 dropout who worked at a wood sawing unit outside Shabnam’s house and aimed to strike it big one day.
But their relationship soon became the source of severe tension in Shabnam’s household — with her parents strongly and steadfastly opposed to their marriage. “I knew Shabnam from my college days … She was my senior in college. Those days, she came across as someone very helpful, someone who never looked like capable of the gruesome crime that followed,” Usman Saifi told Gulf News.
THE FATAL NIGHT
It took Amroha Station House Officer (SHO) RP Gupta, who took charge as the case Investigating Officer in 2008, several months to piece together the gruesome events of the night of April 14.
According to the case history, Shabnam made six of her family members drink tea laced with the sedative diazepam in the evening — her father; mother Hashmi, 50; elder brother Anees, 35 and his wife Anjum, 25; younger brother Rashid, 22; and cousin Rabia, 14.
Between 7.30pm on April 14 and 1.09am the following day, Shabnam and Saleem exchanged a flurry of phone calls — and then there was a gap of 31 minutes. This is the time, according to the Allahabad High Court judgement, when Saleem went over to Shabnam’s house for the murders. Shabnam held each of her family members by their hair, while Saleem severed their necks with an axe, according to the prosecution. Drugged, the family offered no resistance. Shabnam then strangled 10-month-old Arsh — her brother Anees’s son, who couldn’t be drugged with the tea.
“We were not at home when the carnage took place. When we went there at around 2am after the alert in the neighbourhood, there was blood all around and the bodies were cut up. It was horrible, the crime was unpardonable,” said Shabnam’s uncle, speaking to IANS.
When the couple were arrested on April 19, 2008, Shabnam was seven weeks pregnant with Saleem’s child. She delivered the baby in December 2008 — a son called Taj, who is now under the official guardianship of Usman Saifi.
THE TRIAL
On 15 July 2010, district judge SAA Hussaini ruled that Shabnam and Salim should be hanged till death for the multiple murders, a verdict subsequently upheld by the sessions court, the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court. The cross-examination lasted for about 100 dates, and it took the judge 29 seconds to sentence both of them to death.
But during the course of their trial, the couple turned against each other. The Supreme Court observed in its judgement that in her Section 313 statement, Shabnam said Saleem had entered the house with a knife through the roof and killed all her family members while she was asleep. Saleem, on the other hand, said he had gone to the house “only upon the request of Shabnam” and that when he reached there, she confessed to having killed the family. Shabnam had filed a mercy petition before President Pranab Mukherjee, which was rejected.
THE AFTERMATH
According to legal experts quoted in Indian media, Shabnam has exhausted all her pleas, and now it’s the Amroha sessions court that must issue her death warrant. However, a section of them also felt that Shabnam could file a curative review petition to delay the sentence.
Pawan Jallad, the UP-based executioner who carried out the hanging of the four accused in the Nirbhaya case last March, will be executing Shabnam and Salim in Mathura jail. He has been asked to inspect the jail for the hanging and he is ready for the job even though the date for the hanging has not been set yet.
Capital punishment in India
• The death penalty is a legal punishment in India, and is permissible for some crimes under the Indian Penal Code of 1860, as well as other laws.
• Currently, there are more than 400 prisoners on death row in India.
• The most recent executions in India took place in March 2020, when the four men convicted of the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder in 2012 were hanged in Tihar Prison.
• Although a hanging house for women was built 150 years ago in Mathura’s district jail, no woman has been hanged since Independence.
• A woman from Lucknow called Ramshri was sentenced to death on April 6, 1998 — but her death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment at the last moment after she gave birth to a child inside the jail.
— Agencies
