is a convicted criminal, currently serving a life
sentence in prison for the murder of his father,
stepmother, and stepbrother. He committed the murders at
the age of sixteen, on November 22, 1993 in Kolkata,
India.
The murders made headlines in the
Kolkata press due to the gruesome nature of the crimes
and due to the fact that Sajal Barui and his accomplices
were minors at the time.
Early
childhood
Sajal Barui's father, Subal Barui,
abandoned his first wife, Neoti Barui, by whom he bore a
son, and had a relationship with another woman, Minati.
Sajal was conceived out of this affair.
After a few years, his father,
returned to his first wife and took Sajal along with him.
Sajal did not see his natural mother after the age of
eight. After his arrest, he also recounted how he had
often been burned with burning cigarettes and hot irons
in his childhood.
The
murders
On the night of November 22, 1993,
Sajal and five of his friends, all of the same age,
arrived at his residence in North Kolkata. Finding his
stepmother alone, the group gagged her and tied her up
to a chair.
A similar fate befell his stepbrother,
when he arrived, and also his father, shortly before
midnight. Sajal and one of his accomplices Ranjit,
initially tried to murder the three victims by
strangling them, but only the stepmother succumbed.
Unable to kill his father and stepbrother, Sajal and
Ranjit hacked and stabbed them to death. The entire
ordeal took nearly three hours.
After committing the crimes, on
Sajal's directions, his friends cleaned their weapons
with mustard oil and neatly organized them on the table.
Exhausted with the exertion, they ate a few Bengali
sweets from the refrigerator, and left a few coins on
the table as "payment" for the food, an idea that had
occurred to Sajal from watching a television program.
Before, Sajal's friends left, they
tied him up to a chair and gagged him, to give the
appearance that he was a victim too. Initially, he was
able to allay suspicions. However, the Kolkata Police
became suspicious, since he showed no signs of a
struggle or any other injuries.
Upon interrogation, he confessed to
committing the murders and detailed the crimes. Neither
he, nor his accomplices showed any signs of remorse.
Even when the death sentence was announced, the group
chose to clap and sing in unison. Later, the Calcutta
High Court reduced the sentence to life imprisonment.
Escape
Initially Sajal Barui had been
serving his sentence at the Dum Dum Cantonment, but had
been moved to Midnapore Central Jail in July 2000 due to
"administrative problems".
In 2001, while serving his prison
sentence, Sajal Barui showed signs of an alleged kidney
ailment and was transferred to Calcutta National Medical
College and Hospital for examination.
On September 15, 2001 he escaped from
the hospital and was at large until early 2003. On the
night of his escape, Sajal Barui hosted a beer party to
which he invited the two police constables that had been
put on guard to watch him. He often offered beer that
had been smuggled in by his girlfriend, to the
constables, so they did not suspect his motives.
On that night, however, he spiked the
two bottles of beer they had been given to drink with
sleeping pills and watched them fall asleep. He then
walked out of the hospital unhindered.
As a
fugitive
After escaping from the police, Sajal
Barui emailed a friend in Mumbai and fled there. He
married there and returned to Kolkata, leaving his wife
in Asansol. He committed a number of crimes under
various aliases.
Police officers of the Phoolbagan and
Maniktala Police Stations of Calcutta were nearly
successful in recapturing Sajal Barui in early 2003,
after they were able to trace his girlfriend and set up
a sting operation to recapture him. However, Sajal Barui
did not show up for the arranged rendezvous.
Sajal Barui then took refuge in the
den of a local criminal known as Hathkata Bishu (Bengali
for one-armed Bishu) in Lake Town, Kolkata. He worked
with Bishu, under the alias Kamal, and was responsible
for a robbery in the Ultadanga area of Kolkata. As the
search for Kamal intensified, Sajal Barui, migrated to
Jamboni, in West Midnapore district, to work for Rajeev
Meti, a local criminal.
Recapture
In late February 2003, a criminal who
went by the name of Sheikh Raju was arrested for petty
theft in the Jamboni area of West Midnapore district and
was brought to Midnapore Central Jail.
On May 16, 2003, after masquerading
as Sheikh Raju for almost three months, this criminal
was positively identified as Sajal Barui by a jailer who
had met him earlier when he was serving his life
sentence at the Alipore Central Jail in Kolkata.
Activities since recapture
On recapture, Sajal Barui was sent to
the Presidency Jail in Kolkata. Here, he formed a
network with the terrorist, Aftab Ansari, the prime
accused in the 2002 terrorist attack on the American
Center in Kolkata and Debashish Chakraborty, a criminal
convicted of killing his girlfriend and attempting to
kill his mother.
Soon after this criminal nexus was
discovered, Sajal Barui was shifted to the Alipore
Central Jail. Debashish Chakraborty was moved to
Midnapore Central Jail, from where he escaped on May 28,
2005, only to be recaptured two days later.
As of October 2006, Sajal Barui is
serving out his life sentence in jail.
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