The Saket court in New Delhi on October 18, 2023, convicted four persons for the murder of TV journalist Soumya Vishwanathan.
The court also convicted one more person for receiving stolen property.
Additional Sessions Judge Ravindra Kumar Pandey had reserved the judgement on Friday.
Soumya was shot dead on September 30, 2008, while returning home from work in her car at 3:30 a.m. on Nelson Mandela Marg in south Delhi.
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The police had claimed robbery was the motive behind her killing. Five people — Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Baljeet Malik, Ajay Kumar and Ajay Sethi — were arrested for killing her and are in custody since March 2009.
The police had invoked the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against the accused.
The breakthrough in the case came in 2009 during the investigation in the murder of BPO employee Jigisha when one of the accused confessed to also being involved in the journalist’s murder.
Malik and two others — Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla — were earlier convicted in the 2009 killing of IT executive Jigisha Ghosh.
Recovery of the weapon used in Jigisha’s killing had led to the murder case of the journalist getting solved, the police said.
The trial court had awarded death penalty to Kapoor and Shukla and life term to Malik in the Jigisha murder case in 2017.
The following year, however, the Delhi High Court commuted the death sentence of Kapoor and Shukla to life imprisonment and upheld the life term of Malik in the Jigisha murder case.
