Thirteen years after actor-model Laila Khan and her five family members were brutally killed and buried in a farmhouse in the hill-station of Igatpuri in Nashik district, a Mumbai court on Friday sentenced her step-father Parvez Tak to death. Tak was a resident of Jammu & Kashmir, who had links with Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Parvez Tak was the third husband of Saleena Patel.
The main reason behind the crime was property dispute.
The six victims were Laila Khan (30), her mother Saleena Patel (51), her elder sister Azmina Khan (32), her twin siblings Imran Khan and Zara Khan (aged 25) and cousin sister Reshma Khan (22).
The first and second husbands of Saleena Patel were Nadir Patel and Asif Shaikh, respectively, step-fathers of Laila Khan.
The family had gone missing from 7 February 2011 from Mumbai.
Tak was arrested by the J&K police on 8 July, 2012, in a forgery case but he later confessed to murders in Maharashtra.
This led to the discovery of their bodies on 18 July, 2012, from their farmhouse.
Nadir Patil, who is the biological father of Laila Khan, is the main complainant in the case. He named both Asif Shaikh and Parvez Tak.
“The case falls under the rarest of the rare cases,” Additional Sessions Judge SB Pawar said, while awarding death sentence to Parvez Tak.
Laila Khan, born Reshma Patel, had her role opposite Rajesh Khanna in the 2008 movie Wafa: A Deadly Love Story. She began her film career under the stage name Laila Patel in the Kannada film Makeup in 2002.
As the investigations commenced, it led to Igatpuri farmhouse, the last location the family had visited, the place where the crime was discovered.
The prosecution had contended that Tak felt that Selina and her family treated him like a servant and feared that she would abandon as the family had plans of relocating to Dubai.
The prosecution had examined 40 witnesses against Tak over a decade’s time.
Tak was interested in the properties of the Laila Khan family and shares from the business deals they had in Dubai.
Advocate Ujjwal Nikam had appeared as the Special Public Prosecutor, however, since he is contesting the Lok Sabha polls, he resigned from over two dozen cases in which he was appearing for the government and the police.
Public prosecutor Pankaj Chavan had sought the death penalty on the grounds that it was a planned murder where six people in a family were killed in a brutal violent act and their bodies were disposed off.
In his testimony, Shaikh, the second husband of Saleena Patel, said that the girls told him that Tak wanted to force the girls into prostitution.