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'They will be in prison all their life and they will understand what suffering means to Reuben's and Keenan's families.'
On the night of October 20, 2011, Keenan Santos and his friend Reuben Fernandes protected their lady friends from being harassed by goons outside an eatery at Amboli, north-west Mumbai.
The thugs left after Keenan and Reuben intervened, but soon returned, armed, to brutally attack Keenan and Reuben. Both young men were murdered in cold blood.
Valerian Santos, Keenan's father, spoke to Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com after a Mumbai court sentenced the four accused to life imprisonment on Thursday, May 5.
"I am very happy that all the four accused got life imprisonment. These culprits must know what suffering means.
If they had got capital punishment they would have appealed to the President and probably got forgiveness and come out of jail. I didn't want that.
They will be in prison all their life and they will understand what suffering means to Reuben's and Keenan's families.
Our family will never get our children back and we will suffer all our lives. Therefore, they should suffer by remaining in jail.
I always felt how can they have killed my children. Now every minute and every day they will feel the pain for the rest of their lives.
I don't want any other parents to go through what I went through.
I feel the government should set up fast track courts because it took almost five years for these culprits to get punished. If there was a fast track court in place these culprits would have been punished much earlier.
The message that this judgment gives society is that if a person is in trouble, you must intervene."