Behmai massacre verdict after 43 years: One from Phoolan Devi's gang gets life

Lucknow: Exactly 43 years after Phoolan Devi, also known as the 'bandit queen', and her gang shot dead 20 members of the upper caste Thakur community in a revenge killing at the Behmai village in the Kanpur Dehat district in Uttar Pradesh, a district court on Wednesday sentenced one of the accused to life imprisonment while acquitting another for lack of evidence.

According to police sources, an anti-dacoity court in the Kanpur Dehat district sentenced Shyam Babu to life imprisonment while it acquitted another accused, Vishwanath, for lack of evidence.

The accused included Phoolan Devi, who had later joined politics and had gone on to become a Member of Parliament, and her gang members.

Of the 36 accused in the matter, 33, including the 'bandit queen', died during the pendency of the trial. One of the accused, Man Singh, remains at large and the police have not been able to apprehend him so far.

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Phoolan and her gang members had, on February 14, 1981, lined up 20 members of Thakur community in the remote Behmai village and shot them dead.

The massacre had made international headlines and a movie, Bandit Queen , on Phoolan's life was also made by Shekhar Kapur in 1994.

Initially, none from the village dared to lodge a report with the police but later Raja Ram, a resident of Behmai, lodged a report against Phoolan, Mustakeem and others. As many as 28 witnesses in the case also died during the pendency of the trial.

Subsequently, Phoolan Devi, an MP then, was shot dead outside her Delhi residence in 2001.

Phoolan, who represented Mirzapur in the Lok Sabha, was quite popular among the members of her 'Nishad' (boatmen) community.

She was nominated by Samajwadi Party (SP) supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav from Mirzapur in the 1996 general elections after the then SP government withdrew all cases against her and released her from prison.

Behmai massacre verdict after 43 years: One from Phoolan Devi's gang gets life

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