Murtaza almost killed Dhanak’s mother, burnt house down.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A 30-year-old man in Van Nuys, Los Angeles has been sentenced to death for the May 21, 2007 murders of his ex-girlfriend’s father and sister and attempted murder of her mother.
Iftekhar Murtaza was convicted in 2013 of two counts of murder and attempted murder for orchestrating a deadly attack on Shayona Dhanak’s family after she broke up with him.
According to KLTA News, the Dhanaks disapproved of the relationship between their 18-year-old daughter and Murtaza partly because they were practicing Hindus and Murtaza was a non-practicing Muslim, attested prosecutors. Murtaza allegedly blamed the parents for the split, believing they had coerced their daughter into ending the relationship.
Two months later, Shayona Dhanak’s mother, Leela, was found unconscious, beaten, and with her throat slashed on a neighbor’s front lawn after the family’s Anaheim Hills home had been doused with gasoline and immolated.
The scorched bodies of her father and sister, Jaypraykash and Karishma Dhanak, were found near a bike trail at Mason Regional Park in Irvine the next day, according to the D.A.’s office.
The Orange County Register reported before the sentencing, which was on March 3, a statement was orated to the court on behalf of Leela Dhanak, who was unable to attend the hearing.
The evil intentions and actions of one individual spread like wildfire, which consumed and destroyed my family,” she wrote to the judge. “Showing no outward sense of remorse, this individual seems incapable of any empathy or perspective for the result of his actions.”
Leela Dhanak described her husband, Jayprakash, as her “soul mate and companion,” and her daughter Karishma Dhanak as her companion and friend.
“It seems incomprehensible that I survived this ordeal to wake up from my coma and find half my family gone,” Leela Dhanak wrote. “Yet through an act of providence I remained. Now my surviving daughter, Shayona, and I have only each other for mutual comfort.”
Murtaza was aided by two accomplices in the Dhanaks’ brutal assault, both of whom were implicated and tried as co-defendants. Twenty-year-old Charles Anthony Murphy Jr. was found guilty in 2012 and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, while 29-year-old Vitaliy Krasnoperov is currently awaiting a new trial date in the third re-trial of his particular case.