Sajal Barui () is a convicted criminal who is serving a life sentence in prison for the murder of his father, stepmother, and stepbrother. He committed the murders at the age of sixteen, on 22 November 1993 in Kolkata, India. The murders made headlines in the Kolkata press due to the gruesome nature of the crimes and because Barui and his accomplices were minors at the time. Early childhood Sajal Barui's father, Subal Barui, abandoned his first wife, Neoti Barui, by whom he bore a son, and had a relationship with another woman, Minati. Sajal was conceived out of this affair. After a few years, his father returned to his first wife and took Sajal along with him. Sajal did not see his natural mother after the age of eight. After his arrest, he recounted how he had often been burned with burning cigarettes and hot irons in his childhood by his step-mother and elder step-brother The murders On the night of 22 November 1993, Sajal and five of his friends, all of them teenagers, (between the age of 16-17 years) arrived at his residence in North Kolkata. Finding his stepmother alone, the group gagged her and tied her up to a chair. A similar fate befell his stepbrother when he arrived home, and his father, shortly before midnight. Sajal and one of his accomplices, Ranjit, initially tried to murder the three victims by strangling them, but only the stepmother succumbed. Unable to kill his father and stepbrother, Sajal and Ranjit hacked and stabbed them to death. The entire ordeal took nearly three hours. After committing the crimes, on Sajal's directions, his friends cleaned their weapons with mustard oil and neatly organised them on the table. Exhausted with the exertion, they ate a few Bengali sweets from the refrigerator, and left a few coins on the table as "payment" for the food, an idea that had occurred to Sajal from watching a television programme. Before Sajal's friends left, they tied him up to a chair and gagged him, to give the appearance that he was a victim too. Initially, he was able to allay suspicions. However, the Kolkata Police became suspicious, since he showed no signs of a struggle or any other injuries. Upon interrogation, he confessed to committing the murders and detailed the crimes. Later, the Calcutta High Court reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. Escape Initially Sajal Barui