New Delhi, June 20 (TIWN) Appointment of former bureaucrat A.K. Sharma as Vice President of the Uttar Pradesh BJP has come as a surprise to many in the party and government. Till last week, there was a strong buzz across Lucknow and New Delhi that Sharma could be inducted into the Yogi Adityanath government.

By 2 am, they were dead. All six of them. Shabnam allegedly held each of them by their hair while Saleem aimed the axe at their necks. Drugged, they offered no resistance — Shabnam’s father Shaukat Ali, 55, mother Hashmi, 50, elder brother Anees, 35, and wife Anjum, 25, younger brother Rashid, 22, and cousin Rabia, 14. Shabnam then allegedly throttled 10-month-old Arsh, her brother Anees’s baby, who lay still, his dead parents on either side. The seventh victim. Then, the first cries pierced through the stillness of the mango orchards: “Bachao, bachao…” 

That was on April 14-15, 2008. Bawankhedi, a village in Hasanpur tehsil of Amroha in western Uttar Pradesh, had witnessed the most diabolical of murders. Seven years later, on May 15 this year, a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice of India H L Dattu and Justices S A Bobde and Arun Mishra upheld the death sentence awarded by the Amroha Sessions Court in 2010 to Shabnam and her lover Saleem. But only 10 days later, on May 25, the apex court dramatically stayed the death warrants.