New Delhi, India - India's Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal by a Hindu man found guilty of burning alive an Australian missionary and his two sons in eastern India.
Dara Singh is serving a life term for the killings of Graham Staines and his two sons, aged eight and 10.
Staines was a Christian missionary who had worked for three decades with lepers when a Hindu extremist mob torched his jeep in a remote village in the eastern state of Orissa.
A lower court commuted Singh's death sentence in May to life imprisonment, saying there was no proof he was individually responsible for the deaths. It also released 11 of 12 other people who were convicted.
But it upheld Singh's murder conviction, saying he was part of an "unlawful assembly" that set ablaze the station wagon in which the victims were sleeping.
Singh's appeal says his conviction was based on "mere presumption, which is contrary to the principles of criminal justice," the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported.
The court also agreed to hear an appeal by detectives of the federal Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) seeking to restore the death sentence, PTI said.
Hindu groups accused Staines of forcibly converting poor Hindus in Orissa to Christianity.