Nitish Katara murder: Vikas, Vishal Yadav guilty

New Delhi, May 28: A city court today convicted Vikas Yadav and Vishal Yadav, the son and nephew of former MP D P Yadav, in the 2002 Nitish Katara murder case.

Additional Sessions Judge Ravinder Kaur convicted the accused under sections 302 and 364 of IPC and fixed May 30 for pronouncing the sentence. The duo had killed Nitish Katara, a 24-year-old business executive in Delhi, in the early hours of February 17, 2002. The son of an IAS officer in the Ministry of Shipping, Nitish had graduated from the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad. There, he had fallen in love with his classmate, Bharti Yadav, who came from a criminal-politician family.

Nitish was murdered by Bharti's brother Vikas Yadav, because the family did not approve their relationship.

Bharti is the daughter of D P Yadav, the ''unrivalled don'' of western Uttar Pradesh. Before entering politics, Yadav had racked up nine murder charges, and was behind a spurious liquor sale, which killed 350 people in the early 1990s.

Since 1989, he has served several terms as minister in the state government with Mulayam Singh Yadav. In 2004, he became a member of the Parliament under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but such was the ensuing scandal that the party threw him out within days.

UNI