A Kerala court on Tuesday sentenced to death 14 persons associated with the now-banned Islamist outfit Popular Front of India (PFI) in connection with the murder of BJP OBC wing leader Ranjith Sreenivasan in this district in December 2021.

The sentence was pronounced by Mavelikkara Additional District judge V G Sreedevi.

The prosecution had sought the maximum sentence for the convicts, saying that they were a “trained killer squad” and the cruel and diabolical manner in which the victim was killed in front of his mother, infant, and wife brings it within the ambit of the “rarest of the rarest” of crimes.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

The Bharatiya Janta Party’s (BJP) Manoj Sonkar won the Chandigarh mayoral elections today, defeating the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Kuldeep Kumar. The BJP was pitted against an alliance between the Congress and AAP, in the first contest between the newly formed Opposition coalition and the NDA, following Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s sensational switchover to the latter.

The BJP won 16 seats in the 35-member Chandigarh municipal corporation while eight votes were declared invalid.

The AAP-Congress alliance strategically nominated candidates for various positions. Mr Kumar, representing the AAP, contested for the mayoral post, while the Congress fielded candidates for senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor.

The senior deputy mayor post saw Kuljeet Sandhu of the BJP facing off against Congress’s Gurpreet Singh Gabi, while the deputy mayor position was contested between BJP’s Rajinder Sharma and Congress’s Nirmala Devi.

The results of these contests are awaited. 
 

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