Woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Thane district court. (Representational)
A 47-year-old woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Thane district court in Maharashtra for a 2013 murder.
District judge P P Jadhav also imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on the convict, Geeta Jaiswal, in the ruling earlier this week.
Another convict, Soti alias Malkar Chetti Yadav, 48, died at the government-run JJ Hospital in Mumbai last month before the verdict was pronounced.
Geeta Jaiswal, a married woman with two daughters, worked as a scrap segregator for a scrap trader in Wagle Estate area.
Rampal Bhagwat Gupta, 40, the victim, worked as a driver for her employer.
According to the prosecution, Geeta Jaiswal had arranged a loan of Rs 10,000 for Rampal Bhagwat Gupta from another woman, and she had been badgering him to return the money for some time.
She also wanted to marry him, to which Rampal Bhagwat Gupta was not ready, the police said.
On October 11, 2013, she took Rampal Bhagwat Gupta to Navi Mumbai in the auto rickshaw of Soti, an acquaintance.
She and Soti killed Rampal Bhagwat Gupta by hitting him with a stone at an isolated spot, the police told the court.
During the trial, Geeta Jaiswal, who is married, pleaded for leniency, saying she had two daughters to look after.
The judge convicted her for murder under IPC section 302, holding that "chain of circumstances" showing her culpability was established by the prosecution.
However, it was not a "rarest of rare case" to attract death penalty, so she was being sentenced to life imprisonment, the judge said.