A Naogaon court on Wednesday sentenced 10 people, including five brothers, to life imprisonment for the 2013 murder of a farmer over the ownership of a deep tube well in Badalgachhi upazila.
Judge Ferdous Wahid of Naogaon Additional District and Sessions Judge Court-2 gave the order during a hearing in the presence of the accused. He also fined them Tk20,000 each, in default of which they will have to serve two more years in jail, state lawyer Md Abdu Baki said.
The court, however, cleared three people of charges as they were not proven guilty, he added.
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The lifers are Kamruzzaman, his brothers Wahed Ali, Shamsuzzaman, Rocket and Dablu; Abdul Hamid and his brother Enamul Hoque; Mosharraf Hossain, Bajlur Rahman and Emdadul Hoque from the village Durgapur.
Bajlur's wife Karima Begum, Enamul's wife Joly Akter and Md Jibon Ahmed of the same village were cleared of charges.
According to the case statement, two groups of villagers had been at loggerheads over the ownership of the deep tube well in Durgapur. A group of armed men led by Kamruzzaman swooped on farmer Ujjal Hossain and three others over it, leaving them critically injured, on May 9, 2013.
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Ujjal succumbed to his injuries while undergoing treatment at Rajshahi Medical College Hospital four days later.
On the following day, the village's Deep Tube Well Association General Secretary Majharul Islam filed a murder case accusing 13 people at Badalgachhi Police Station.