Agencies/New Delhi

A New Delhi court yesterday sentenced the man convicted of killing “bandit queen” Phoolan Devi to life imprisonment, 13 years after she was gunned down in broad daylight.
Devi, a heroine of India’s lower castes who transformed herself from an illiterate villager to a member of parliament, was shot by three masked men outside her home in central New Delhi in 2001.
Sher Singh Rana, who police said had confessed to her murder, was convicted last week after a trial that had dragged on for more than a decade.
Yesterday Judge Bharat Parashar announced the life sentence to a packed courtroom in Delhi and fined him Rs100,000 ($1,600).
Rana, a member of the upper castes, was arrested for her murder in 2001. He escaped from pre-trial custody in the high-security Tihar Jail in February 2004, but was recaptured in 2006.
The prosecution had asked for the death penalty, saying the crime was “planned” and “meticulously executed”.
Rana had pleaded in the court for leniency, saying he had the responsibility of looking after his old and ailing mother.
The court had earlier acquitted 10 other defendants in Devi’s killing, with the judge saying the prosecution failed to prove its case against them beyond reasonable doubt.
Police said after Devi’s death that Rana had confessed to murdering the 38-year-old politician to avenge the deaths of 22 upper-caste Hindus she was accused of murdering on Valentine’s Day in 1981.
Devi herself said the Valentine’s Day massacre in the north Indian village of Behmai was in retaliation for her gang-rape by upper-caste Hindus.
Reports published after the massacre say that Devi, carrying a gun and with ammunition strung across her chest, led a group of around 20 people posing as police officers into the village where the men lived.
She reportedly ordered the villagers to hand over two rival gangsters, and when they failed to do so, told her men to round up all the young men in the village. They were then lined up on a riverbank and shot.
Devi finally surrendered to authorities in 1983 after years spent on the run with her gangster lover.
Together they are said to have laid siege to villages in the impoverished and sparsely populated badlands of the central state of Madhya Pradesh, looting and killing and holding up trains.
She was released from jail in 1994 and two years later was elected to parliament, with followers holding her up as a modern-day Robin Hood.
Her life story was captured in the 1996 movie Bandit Queen, which traced her journey from abused child-bride to feared outlaw in the ravines of central India and finally a member of parliament.
Rana, 38, is expected to appeal against the sentence in a higher court.