Inmate sentenced in DA kidnap plot

Stephen Romano

A man who was serving time for killing a Manhasset man in 1993 was sentenced to an additional three to six years for plotting to kidnap and assault the former Nassau County assistant district attorney who prosecuted him.

Chandran Nathan, 59, pleaded guilty on Feb. 24 to second-degree criminal solicitation after an investigation found he offered $10,000 to abduct the former prosecutor, Fred Klein, and place him in handcuffs and assault him, prosecutors said.

He requested that Klein be beaten — but not around his face — and waterboarded to force him to make a videotaped statement saying Nathan’s confession was coerced, prosecutors said.

“I am grateful to the Nassau DA for protecting me and for insuring that justice was obtained,” Klein said in an email.

“Any effort to harm or intimidate our prosecutors, current or former, will be met with serious consequences, and this defendant’s foolhardy plot to have a former prosecutor kidnapped and assaulted in a desperate effort to get himself out of prison only earned him more time behind bars,” Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas said. “I’m grateful for the assistance of the NCPD DA Squad, our investigators, and the New York Stated Department of Corrections for their outstanding work on this case.”

Nathan wanted Klein to mention a few cases he prosecuted so the video would not be linked back to him, the district attorney’s office said.

Nathan, an inmate at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in upstate New York, was sentenced to  37 years in prison in 1994 for killing Shaleen Wadhwani, a 20-year-old medical student from Manhasset, who was engaged to Hema Sakhrani.

Nathan shot Wadhwani 11 times with a semiautomatic rifle at his home in Manhasset on May 26, 1993. Nathan was obsessed with Sakhrani and was angered over her engagement to Wadhwani with whom she was living, prosecutors said.

Two days after Wadhwani was killed, Sakhrani committed suicide by jumping from the 16th-floor terrace of her family’s Queens apartment.

He was eligible for parole in 2030, and is now eligible in 2033.

“His motivation basically was that he had exhausted all of his appeals, and I think he should be examined to determine his stability,” Stephen Murphy, Nathan’s defense lawyer, said in November.

Murphy said Nathan wanted to get out of jail to care for his mother, who has cancer.

Murphy was not Nathan’s attorney in the 1994 case.

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