KEY POINTS:
When Auckland taxi driver Bhikubhai Patel put out a contract on part-time Hindu priest Sunil Sharda, he went looking for a value-added killing.
For $1500 up front - and promises of more on completion - he expected his victim's tongue to be cut out, his eyeballs poked out
and the body decapitated.
If the victim could be sodomised, dismembered or burned, then that would be all right, too.
But the Herald can today reveal that the plan fell apart only because Patel unwittingly approached a police informant to do the job.
Court orders suppressing the identity of Patel, his family and the priest were lifted with yesterday's verdict, but the identity of the informant-hitman remains suppressed.
It took eight years for Patel's hatred of Mr Sharda to build to a point where he decided to rid himself of his turbulent priest.
The pair had met briefly in 1996, when Sharda - who was moonlighting as a service station attendant - was running his ministry door to door.
Mr Sharda said he had met the Patels "six or seven times" at Hindu prayer meetings, and later met Mrs Patel a couple of times for coffee and to discuss immigration matters.
There had been no personal relationship - of any sort.
"I don't have affairs with other women," Mr Sharda told a High Court jury early in the trial.
But before long, rumours were spreading through Auckland's Fijian-Indian community that he had been seeing Patel's wife.
Patel accosted Mr Sharda on the forecourt one day in 1996 and said he knew of the affair and warned him to "watch out".
The priest was in a serious car accident not long after, and put Patel out of his mind.
But Patel did not forget, and for the next eight years he fought with his wife over the alleged affair.
By June 2004, he had hired a private investigator to follow his wife and report on the lunchtime assignations he believed she and "the preacher man" were having.
But investigator Hugh Thompson eventually decided there was not enough time to conduct an affair "of any substance" during a lunch hour, and told Patel it was a waste of his money, and the firm's time, to continue the stakeout.
Patel by that stage was obsessed. He wanted Mr Sharda dead.
An answer to his problem appeared not long after when he allowed his mind to drift off while at work and crashed his taxi.
It was through a South Auckland panelbeating shop that he met the man who would be his killer for hire.
In a series of meetings over kava sessions, and in carparks across Auckland, Patel told the would-be hitman - referred to as "Mr X" in a minute from Justice Geoffrey Venning - exactly what he wanted done to Mr Sharda.
"Torture him before killing him ... After you kill him, make him sit in the vehicle. Set the vehicle on fire, and push it down the hill ... Make it as bad as you can, you know what I am saying?"
When it dawned on Mr X that Patel might be serious, he told the authorities.
It was not the first time he had tipped off police. He had once been paid $400 for information about a cannabis operation.
It took the jury in the High Court at Auckland less than three hours yesterday to find Patel guilty on a charge of attempting to procure a murder, and five charges of threatening to kill his wife and Mr Sharda.
He was remanded in custody for sentencing on April 4.
Verdict
* Bhikubhai Patel, 48, was found guilty of attempting to procure murder and five charges of threatening to kill his wife.
* He was found not guilty of threatening to kill his 17-year-old daughter.