NASHIK: A court here has sentenced a man to a year in jail for jumping parole in 2016, while serving a life term for the murder of Mumbai-based lawyer Pallavi Purkayastha.
The court of Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) Mathura Yadav found Sajjad Mughal guilty of jumping parole under section 224 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sentenced him to a one-year imprisonment, public prosecutor Anil Bagale said.
The section prescribes a maximum jail term of two years for "resistance or obstruction by a person to his lawful apprehension".
The court also imposed a fine of Rs 5,000 on Mughal, who was on the run for 18 months, Bagale said.
Parole is the conditional release of prisoners before they complete their sentence.
Mughal, who was working as a watchman of a housing society at suburban Wadala in Mumbai, was sentenced to life imprisonment (till his death) by a court in 2014 for murdering Purkayastha, the daughter of an IAS officer, in her flat after failing to rape her in 2012.
In 2016, he was released on parole from the Nashik Central Jail to visit his ailing mother in Kashmir.
However, the convict had failed to return before the expiry of his parole period, following which a case was registered against him at the Nashik Road police station.
He was finally arrested by a Mumbai police team from a spot near Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir in October, 2017.
The public prosecutor said the court had examined eight witnesses during the course of the trial.