MURDER BY GERMS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 56, Issue 76, 11 January 1936, Page 5

MURDER BY GERMS

UNIQUE CASE IN INDIA. CRIME TO INHERIT ESTATE. DEATHI SENTENCE COMMUTED. (United Press Association—Copyright.) (Received This Day, 2.25 p.m.) LONDON, Jan. 10. The Calcutta correspondent of "The Times" says that an appeal in a. germ murder case, which the judges declared was unique in the annals of crime, resulted in two death sentences being commuted to transportation for life to the Andaman 'lslands. The accused, Benayendranath Pandey and Dr. Taranath Battacharya were convicted of conspiring to murder Amarendranath Pandey,. a rich landholder, by plague bacillus, injected by an unknown man, who rushed by him at the railway station in Calcutta when in company with Benayendranath, who was his step brother. After failure of the attempt to infect him by smearing bacillus on his spectacles, the prosecution alleged, Battacharya, who was a worker on cultures, obtained bacillus from a laboratory in Bombay. A telltale feature of Amarendranath's death was when a blood test revealed plague, which was quiescent. The original hearing lasted 140 days, there being S 5 witnesses. The evidence disclosed that Benayendranath, in the event of A mai 'endranath's death, would succeed to an estate worth £SOOO per annum. The trial judge rejected a recommendation to mercy, on the grounds that the murder was diabolically conceived and cold-bloodedly executed. The appeal judge commuted the hanging as the convicted men had been ten months under sentence, and he also hoped the commuting would lead to the discovery of the actual perpetrator.