PUNE: A sessions court here has convicted and sentenced an army lance naik to life imprisonment for strangling his wife to death at their residential block at the Ghorpadi Lines on February 20, 2012.Lance Naik Gangadatt Liladhar Tiwari (39) had initially claimed that his wife Rashmi committed suicide. However, her post mortem report revealed asphyxia as the cause of death, which led to the police registering a case of murder.Additional public prosecutor Leena Pathak told TOI, “Tiwari’s conduct was suspicious as he first called a private doctor to inspect his wife despite having access to the army’s medical services. When the doctor advised him to immediately rush her to a hospital as she seemed to have passed away, he left the house leaving behind his three-year-old son. Later, he made a call from Mumbai to his neighbour, an army naik, that he won’t return soon as his wife had committed suicide.”Pathak said, “Tiwari’s conduct following his wife’s death, the circumstantial evidence, the injury marks on his neck that suggested resistance by the victim, and injuries established in the post-mortem report proved critical in the conviction of the accused.”Additional sessions judge R V Adone observed in her ruling, “The intention of the accused can be gathered from the evidence on record that the accused strangulated his wife in their house and left the house by leaving their small child of three years. He made an attempt to show that it was a case of hanging. He gave false information to the police and doctor. It is revealed that due to differences, quarrel between them, he did the act.”The court took into account the fact that Tiwari had been serving in the army, he had no criminal antecedents and that his son and aged parents are dependent on him.Besides, the case did not fall within the definition of the rarest of rare cases to attract the capital punishment.Tiwari, who had been out of jail on bail, was taken into custody and sent to the Yerawada central jail soon after judge Adone pronounced the judgment and sentence. “A report has been sent to the army unit where he had been posted at the time of the incident,” Pathak said.In his defence, Tiwari had maintained that he was in the bathroom when his wife committed suicide in their bedroom and he had to break into the room to realize what had happened.However, the lance naik found it difficult to establish before the police investigators the circumstances and his behaviour of leaving his son in the house and informing his neighbour about the incident.

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