Nitish Katara murder case: Here's all what you need to know

Nitish Katara and Vikas and Vishal Yadav

Supreme Court on Monday awarded 25- year jail term each to Vikas Yadav and cousin Vishal Yadav for their role in the kidnapping and killing of Nitish Katara in 2002.

A bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and C Nagappan also handed down a 20-year jail sentence to their co-convict Sukhdev Pehalwan in the case. The court said both the jail terms would run concurrently that would effectively lead to the award of 25 years of imprisonment to the Yadavs.

Simultaneously, Pehalwan, who was granted 25-year jail term in the case by the high court, will now have to face 20-year imprisonment in the matter. The order came on the appeals filed by Vikas and Vishal against the Delhi high court order which had enhanced the life term to 25 years in jail without remission and an additional five years for destruction of evidence in the case, terming Katara's murder as "honour killing".

The Yadavs' acquaintance Sukhdev Yadav alias Pehelwan was then awarded an enhanced life sentence of 25 years without remission by the high court which had held that the crime fell in 'rarest of rare category', but saved them from the gallows saying possibility of their reformation and rehabilitation was not 'unforseeably foreclosed'.

Who was Nitish Katara

Nitish Katara was a 25-year-old Indian business executive in Delhi, who was murdered in the early hours of 17 February 2002, by Vikas Yadav, the son of influential criminal-politician D. P. Yadav. Nitish had graduated from the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, where, he had fallen in love with his classmate, Bharti Yadav, sister of Vikas. Nitish Katara and Bharti Yadav were seeing each other for over four years which the latter's family did not approve and Nitish was also threatened several times/

The murder
On 16th February, 2002, Bharti and Nitish attended a friends wedding in Ghaziabad along with Bharti's mother, her brother Vikas and sister Bhavna.

After the wedding, Vikas Yadav and his cousin Vishal Yadav allegedly took Katara into their Tata Safari SUV but did not come back till late night. This got Nitish's mother worried who called Bharti. It turned out that Bharti herself was trying to find out Nitish's whereabouts. She told his mother 'to go to the police, adding that maybe her brothers - Vikas and Vishal - had taken Nitish to Punjab'. Next morning, the police found a battered and burned body at Khurja, some 80 km from the wedding venue. The body had been so badly beaten that 'the digestive system had fallen out'

Here is the timeline of the case

Feb 16-17, 2002: Vikas and Vishal Yadav abduct Nitish Katara from a wedding function in Ghaziabad late at night. They allegedly disapproved of Nitish's intimacy with their sister Bharti.

March 31, 2002: Uttar Pradesh police file four-page charge sheet in the murder case

April 22, 2002: Vishal and Vikas arrested from Madhya Pradesh

April 22, 2002: After victim's mother, Neelam Katara fears miscarriage of justice, Supreme Court directs that the case be transferred from a sessions court to be heard by a competent court of similar jurisdiction in Delhi

November 23, 2002: Separate trial launched against third accused in the murder case, Sukhdev Pehalwan, who was arrested in 2005

April 23, 2003: Court summons Bharti Yadav, who had been in the U.K. since the death of Nitish Katara,for recording her statement

November 25, 2006: After three years of unheeded notices and summonses, Bharti Yadav returns to India after the court threatens to declare her as a proclaimed offender

December 2007: Prosecution determines Bharti's alleged closeness with Nitish as Vikash and Vishal's murder motive

April 2, 2008: Trial court begins hearing Nitish Katara murder case on day-to-day basis

April 23, 2008: Trial comes to an end

May 30, 2008: Court finds Vikas and Vishal guilty, sentences them to life in prison.

July 12, 2008: Sukhdev Pehalwan sentenced to life imprisonment too by a Delhi court

April 2, 2014: Delhi High Court upholds trial court verdict of life terms for Yadav brothers and contract killer Sukhdev Pehalwan.

February 6, 2015: Delhi HC awards Vikas and Vishal life terms of 25 years without remission and Sukhdev Pehalwan gets 20 years life imprisonment without remission.

October 9, 2015: The Supreme Court declines plea by Neelam Katara to award death sentence to the Yadav duo.

October 3, 2016: The Supreme Court awards a 25-year jail term to Vishal Yadav and a 20-year term to Sukhdev Pehalwan.