In a First, India Executing Women: Sister Serial Killers

Pair convicted of murdering five kids, suspected in other killings
By Shelley Hazen,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 19, 2014 4:18 PM CDT
In a First, India Executing Women: Sister Serial Killers
Renuka Shinde and her sister Seema Gavit, two sisters from Maharashtra, may become the first women to be hanged in India.   (National Newzstreet)

Serial killer sisters, who kidnapped and murdered at least five children, are poised to become the first women hanged in India, reports the Washington Post. “This is indeed one of the rarest of the rare cases where the perpetrators deserve the death sentence,” a human rights lawyer tells the Hindu. Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit were charged in 2001 with 13 kidnappings and 10 murders, and convicted of five killings, reports the Telegraph. Their killing spree began in 1990 when the girls were teen pickpockets and their mother told them to kidnap her ex's daughter, their half-sister. After that, mother and daughters kidnapped street kids ages 1 to 5, turned them into pickpockets and decoys, then killed them. Their mother died in prison, the Mumbai Mirror reports.

Some of the sisters' ghastly crimes: They killed an infant by bashing his head against an electric pole, dropped a 7-month old to stop its crying, bludgeoned a boy while he hung upside down, and dismembered another and stuffed his parts in a bag, the Post reports. The killing ended as it began—with a revenge kidnapping and murder in 1996, also plotted by their mother as revenge against her ex. The 9-year-old, his daughter, was dumped in a field and an eventual investigation led to the sisters' other crimes. The sisters say they're innocent and wrongly convicted. A recent plea for mercy was rejected. (More death penalty stories.)

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