Rajendra Jakkal, Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar, Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap and Munawar Harun Shah were commercial art students at the Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya on Tilak Road in Pune. Between January 1976 and March 1977 the four of them killed ten people. They had a reputation on the campus for drinking and for robbery before any of it began.
The first victim was a classmate, Prakash Hegde, whose father ran a small restaurant behind the college. On January 15, 1976 the four, with another student named Suhas Chandak, picked him up on a false pretence, took him to a tin shed on Karve Road and made him write a note saying he was leaving home. They gagged him and killed him the following night at Peshwe Park. Housebreakings followed. On the night of October 31, 1976 they forced their way into Achyut Joshi's house in the centre of the city and strangled Joshi, his wife Usha and their teenage son Anand with nylon rope, taking a watch, a mangalsutra and several thousand rupees. On December 1, 1976 they entered Smriti bungalow on Bhandarkar Road and killed five members of the Abhyankar household, among them the Sanskrit scholar Kashinath Shastri Abhyankar, his wife Indirabai, his grandson Dhananjay, his granddaughter and the family's maid. Those three episodes account for nine of the ten; the remaining killing is recorded inconsistently across the available accounts and is not detailed here.
The dead were Prakash Hegde, twenty; Achyut Joshi, his wife Usha and their teenaged son Anand; Kashinath Shastri Abhyankar, eighty-eight, his wife Indirabai, seventy-six, their maid Sakubai Wagh, sixty, their granddaughter Jai, twenty-one, and their grandson Dhananjay, nineteen; and Anil Gokhale.
The case broke when Chandak, who had been present at the Hegde kidnapping, told the police what he knew and became an approver. Property stolen from the Joshi and Abhyankar houses was recovered.
The trial opened in the Pune district and sessions court on May 15, 1978 and ran more than four months. On September 28, 1978 the additional sessions judge, W. N. Bapat, sentenced all four to death. Appeals to the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court failed and a mercy petition to the President was refused. The four were hanged at the Yerawada central jail on November 27, 1983, an execution that drew crowds in Pune.
Shah was twenty-one at the time of the killings, and it was his appeal that gave the case its name in the Indian law reports. The figure of ten victims is the total for the group and not for Shah alone. Jakkal, Sutar and Jagtap have their own entries in this archive, and all four describe the same ten murders.