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Hannah case: Kohli found guilty,
to serve 24 yrs in jail
WSN Network
London:
The Indian accused of raping and murdering British teenager Hannah
Foster has been found guilty of all charges and has been sentenced
to 24 years in jail in the UK.
Maninder Pal
Singh Kohli has been convicted five years after he committed the
crime.
Seventeen-year-old British school girl Hannah Foster was raped and
murdered after a night out in Southhampton in March 2003.
Kohli, who fled
to India
after committing the crime was later caught in
West Bengal.
At the time he
was arrested, Kohli had been living in Kalimpong under an assumed
name.
The 41-year-old
former delivery driver for a sandwich firm will spend a minimum of
24 years behind bars before he could be considered for parole.
Amid dramatic
scenes at Winchester Crown court, Kohli was convicted by a 12-member
jury of bundling the teenager into the back of his van, raping and
strangling her before dumping her body in a ditch in
Southampton.
The jury,
including four women, delivered its unanimous verdict after
deliberating for five and a half hours.
The sensational
case had hit headlines in Britain and India where Kohli, a father of
two, had fled after the murder.
He changed his
name there but was finally apprehended in Darjeeling and extradited
to Britain in July 2007 following a media campaign orchestrated by
Hannah's parents and the Hampshire police.
Kohli had
claimed he was innocent and that he had been abducted, blindfolded
and tied up on the night of Hannah's death and forced to have sex
with the teenager.
During the
six-week trial, he painted a picture of himself as a victim of a
revenge attack orchestrated by his former colleague. Kohli said he
owed his colleague 16,000 pounds and had an affair with his wife.
Foster was
walking a short distance home after a night out when she disappeared
in March 2003. Kohli snatched the teenager from a street yards from
her home in Southampton after she had spent an evening with friends.
26 November
2008
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