India, July 31 -- Former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) councillor Tahir Hussain and four others were on Friday sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer Ankit Sharma during the 2020 Delhi riots, with a city court ruling that while the crime was "horrendous" and "sickening", the prosecution had failed to prove that the convicts were beyond the possibility of reform.

Additional sessions judge Parveen Singh of the Karkardooma courts sentenced Hussain, and four others - Kasim, Nazim, Javed and Anas - to imprisonment for life.

The court rejected the Delhi Police's plea for capital punishment. The court observed that although the murder fell within the "rarest of the rare" category on account of its brutality, ...