The Supreme Court on Wednesday awarded life term to 6 convicts for the murder of IIM graduate S Manjunath, who was murdered by oil mafia in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district in 2005 when he sought to expose corruption and petrol adulteration.

A bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and N V Ramana rejected the appeals filed by the convicts against the 2009 verdict of the Allahabad High Court, which had convicted the six men (Pawan Kumar alias Monu Mittal, Rakesh Anand, Vivek Sharma.,Devesh Agnihotri, Shiv Kesh Giri and Rajesh Verma) and acquitted two (Rajiv Awasthi and Harish Misra). Manjunath was a graduate from IIM-Lucknow who was 27-year-when he was murdered on November 19, 2005.

Manjunath had threatened to cancel the licence of Mittal’s petrol pump for selling adulterated fuel. He was shot dead when he reached the petrol pump, owned by prime accused Pawan Kumar, to collect samples of adulterated petrol allegedly being sold from his outlet.

A national outcry led to a CBI probe into the case. The trial court had convicted eight accused in the murder. Pawan Kumar was sentenced to death. However, in 2009, the Allahabad High Court commuted Kumar’s death sentence to life.

Two IIM graduates – Anjali Mulatti and Jaishankar – had set up ‘The Manjunath Shanmugam Trust’, to secure justice for Manjunath by getting his killers punished.