Chandigarh, Feb. 10 -- A Zirakpur man, who had murdered his estranged girlfriend and his sister with a pair of scissors at their rented accommodation in the heart of Chandigarh in August 2019, will spend the rest of his life in jail, a local court has ruled. The convict, Kuldeep Singh, now aged 39, had forced his entry into the victims' one-room accommodation on the second floor of a house in Sector 22 on August 15, 2019, early in the morning. The bodies of the sisters, Manpreet Kaur, 26, and Rajwant Kaur, 24, were found with the throats slit the same day. The sisters belonged to Abohar town of Fazilka district in Punjab and worked in a factory at Zirakpur on the outskirts of Chandigarh. Son of a retired Chandigarh Police inspector, who has since passed away, Kuldeep had broken into the house to check Manpreet's WhatsApp as he suspected her of being in a relationship with another man. He had met Manpreet in 2010, while working together at a call centre in Sector 34. As per case files, the duo had an argument before he slit Manpreet's throat with a pair of scissors lying in the room. Before that, he even tried to strangulate her with his bare hands and her dupatta. As her shocked younger sister, Rajwant, raised the alarm, he turned on her, stabbing her repeatedly. One of the occupants of the first floor, who ran a tiffin service, had heard the sisters' screams around 5 am. When she went to check on the sisters, she ran into Kuldeep, who she said used to visit the girls routinely. He asked her to leave and locked the door from outside, before leaving. After the sisters' did not answer repeated phone calls by family members on Rakshabandhan, police were alerted. As they entered their house, they found the two lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Hot on the accused's trail, police tracked down Kuldeep to the New Delhi railway station the same day. The bloodied scissors used in the crime were found in his bag. The motorcycle he had used to reach the victims' house was also recovered. The accused was charged under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to which he said he was not guilty and the case was committed to sessions court for trial on November 23, 2019. The prosecution examined 33 witnesses including police officers and various officials from the CFSL to prove that the accused had committed the crime. In his statement, the accused pleaded that he was falsely implicated in this case. However, the court of additional sessions judge Sonika ruled that the prosecution had proved the chain of circumstantial evidence by connecting each fact with another and proved the charges against the accused under Section 302 of the IPC. The accused was convicted on Friday while the hearing to pronounce the quantum of sentence was held on Monday. Seeking leniency, the convict submitted that he was 39 years old and the sole caretaker of his ageing mother. The court, however, observed that the offence was of a grave nature, involving the killing of two persons after inflicting injuries with a sharp-edged weapon and strangulation. The court ruled that no lenient view was possible in the matter of sentence. At the same time, it held that the case did not fall within the category of the "rarest of rare", which would warrant the death penalty. Sentencing Kuldeep Singh to rigorous imprisonment for life, the court also imposed a fine of Rs.30,000....