A construction worker was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Dubai Criminal court on Wednesday, April 20, after he stabbed an Indian couple to death.
The accused is a 26-year-old man from Pakistan, and he hid outside the house of the Indian couple, Hiren Adhiya, aged 48, and Vidhi Adhiya, aged 40, at Arabian Ranches for around six hours before he got inside through an unlocked door in the middle of the night on June 17, 2020.
He thought about stealing the money and jewellery he saw while carrying out maintenance work in their house in December 2019.
After the couple switched off the lights, he sneaked inside the house in the mirador district and stole around Dh1,965 from a wallet that he found on the ground floor. He then went upstairs in search of more money.
He went inside the couple’s bedroom and tried to open the drawer when Adhiya woke up to the sound of the drawer opening, after which the accused stabbed him to death before turning towards his wife.
Forensic reports of Adhiya reveal that he was stabbed continuously ten times in the chest, head, left shoulder and abdomen. At the same time, his wife was stabbed 14 times in her chest, face, head, neck, ear and right arm.
The stabs were so powerful that even their blanket was penetrated. As the accused ran outside the bedroom, he came through the couple’s daughter, who was just 18, and he stabbed her in the neck, causing several injuries.
The girl, along with her younger sister, aged 15, witnessed this brutal crime scene before the injured daughter called the police and one of his father’s friends.
Investigators found a handprint of blood on the mansion’s wall and a mask on the couple’s bed with blood samples matching the DNA of the accused. They also found the weapon (knife) around 500 metres away from the mansion.
After an investigation was launched, the attacker was caught after a few days in Sharjah.
During interrogation, the man confessed his crime of the couple’s murder, attempting of daughter’s murder and theft.
Three days before the murder, his mother in Pakistan had become ill, and he was desperate for money, said the accused.
But, during the hearing in court in November 2020, he denied all the charges against him.
In her testimony in February last year, the daughter told the court that at about 1:30 am on the day of the murder, she used her portable flashlight to check on the ruckus upstairs after listening to some cries for help coming from her parent’s room.
“I met him at the room’s door, and he stabbed me with a knife, but I kicked him before he ran,” she had told judges.
The deceased’s friend said the girl was shouting uncontrollably when she called him at around 2 am.
“She was crying that her mother was dead and her father was still moving and that she was wounded too,” he said in court.
“I assumed she had a nightmare at first, but when my wife and I reached the villa, we saw police and an ambulance.”
Prosecutors pursued the death penalty against the defendant as the crime was premeditated and planned. The judgment can be petitioned within 15 days.