Amritsar (Punjab), May 31 (IANS) Three Indians, on death row in Sharjah, were released and returned home here Tuesday after a Dubai-based NGO paid Rs.18 lakh in blood money to save them.
The three men, in their twenties, were sentenced to death in Sharjah for bootlegging and murder of a fellow Indian. The Dubai-based NGO Sarbat Da Bhala paid the blood money to the victim’s family, S.P. Singh Oberoi, founder of the NGO, told IANS Tuesday.
The Sharjah court accepted the three death row prisoners’ plea to give money to the victim’s family and released them, he said.
‘We have paid Rs.18 lakh as blood money. I shelled out Rs.12 lakh from my own pocket and the rest of the amount was arranged by the accused men’s families. It was not at all easy to convince the other party to take the blood money,’ he said.
The three young men are Kashmiri Lal, resident of Bhar Singh Pura village in Nawanshahr district, Trilochan Singh and Pradeep Kumar of Sakroli and Fatehgarh Naira villages (both in Hoshairpur district) respectively.
‘I held meetings with the father of the deceased several times to convince him. Besides, it included a long paper work. They agreed to take blood money in July last year but it still took 11 months for the release,’ he pointed out.
The three men were involved in bootlegging, which led to the murder of a fellow Indian, Bikram Jeet Singh, resident of Dayalgarh village in Gurdaspur district, in October 2008.
Thereafter, they were arrested and were sentenced to death in 2009 in Sharjah.
The three men had taken huge loans from banks and private money-lenders to pursue their foreign dreams.
‘Last three years were the most difficult phase of my life and we had actually lost all hopes of returning home. We were falsely implicated in this case and were arrested by the police just on the basis of suspicion. I think nobody should leave his home and go abroad,’ Kashmiri Lal told IANS.
Pardeep Kumar said: ‘They forced us to sign a paper that had some text written in Arabic language. We did not understand it. Moreover, nobody provided us any interpreter and we were very helpless when the court announced death sentence for us. We owe our life to S.P. Singh and his NGO.’
Oberoi, a Dubai-based businessman, is involved in many other humanitarian activities in Punjab. So far, he has also sponsored over 6,000 marriages of under-privileged youths here.
Around 32 families, whose relatives are lodged in Dubai jails, came here Tuesday to meet Oberoi.
In one case, 16 Punjabi boys were sentenced to death by a Shariat court in Sharjah in March 2010. They were convicted of murdering a Pakistani man and injuring three others in January 2009 following a fight over illegal liquor business.
