A court in Telangana on Monday sentenced a man to death and gave life imprisonment to six others in connection with the 2018 killing of a 23-year-old Dalit man in Miryalaguda, in Nalgonda district, reported The Indian Express.

The Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes Sessions Second Additional Court handed death penalty to Subhash Sharma, who was reportedly hired to kill Perumulla Pranay. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 15,000 on Sharma and Rs 10,000 each on the other six convicts.

Pranay was hacked to death on September 14, 2018, in front of his pregnant wife Amrutha Varshini, who belongs to an upper-caste family, while they were leaving a hospital in Nalgonda. The couple had eloped and married in January 2018 as Varshini’s family was against the relationship. A day after the murder, Varshini blamed her father, T Maruthi Rao, for the killing.

In 2019, the Nalgonda police filed a chargesheet under Indian Penal Code sections pertaining to murder (302), criminal conspiracy (120B), abetment (109), along with provisions of the Indian Arms Act, naming eight accused in the case.

Maruthi Rao was found dead in a hotel room in Hyderabad in March 2020 while out on bail. He is believed to have died by suicide. Rao was accused of paying Rs 1 crore to Sharma for murdering his son-in-law. The CCTV footage of the incident had caused widespread outrage.