[ARABNEWS] An Indian court on Thursday sentenced the man convicted of killing India's "bandit queen" Phoolan Devi to life imprisonment, 13 years after she was bumped off in broad daylight.Devi, a heroine of India's lower castes who transformed herself from an illiterate villager to a member of parliament, was shot by three masked men outside her home in central New Delhi in 2001.
Sher Singh Rana, who police said had confessed to her murder, was convicted last week after a trial that had dragged on for more than a decade.
On Thursday Judge Bharat Parashar announced the life sentence to a packed courtroom in Delhi and fined him 100,000 rupees ($1,600), the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
The court had earlier acquitted 10 other defendants in Devi's killing, with the judge saying the prosecution failed to prove its case against them beyond reasonable doubt.
Police said after Devi's death that Rana had confessed to murdering the 38-year-old politician to avenge the deaths of 22 upper-caste Hindus she was accused of murdering on Valentine's Day in 1981.
Devi herself said the Valentine's Day massacre in the north Indian village of Behmai was in retaliation for her gang-rape by upper-caste Hindus.
Reports published after the massacre say that Devi, carrying a gun and with ammunition strung across her chest, led a group of around 20 people posing as coppers into the village where the men lived.