This is NOT our typical "Your Sikhs today" story involving drug smuggling, Diversity Truck Lines and the Singh School of Truck Driving. Rather it is a sad tale of a Sikh couple, Jagpreet Singh (51) and Balwinder Kaur (41)...
...whose marriage ended just six days after Mr Singh landed in Canada, sponsored by Ms Kaur. We should say the late Ms Kaur, as Mr Singh has now been found guilty by a British Columbia court of murdering her. Here's what happened.
Mr Singh and Mr Kaur were married for over 20 years. They were the parents of two children who grew up in India with their parents. Their daughter moved to Canada as one of the 1000s of "temporary foreign students" welcomed by the Liberal government of former PM Blackie McBlackface. In a typical case of chain migration, Ms Kaur came to Canada in 2022 to "assist" [babysit? Ed.] her daughter.
Mr Singh arrived in mid-March of 2024. He had been in Canuckistan only six days when, on the fateful night, the couple went out to a gurdwara (temple) and later a mall. They returned around 2130, and within the hour Ms Kaur was stabbed. A neighbour arrived at their basement apartment in Abbotsford BC shortly thereafter and saw Ms Kaur motionless in a pool of blood, inside the doorway.
In her judgment, Madame Justice Andrea Ormiston of the BC Supreme Court wrote, "When police entered the home, Mr Singh was a few metres away from her, either seated or kneeling on or near the sofa in the living room." He was arrested immediately, at which time he "had a bump and a minor cut to his forehead that he agreed were caused in the course of his arrest. He also had a small abrasion, or a superficial cut to his left shoulder. Mr. Singh showed no signs of impairment or intoxication, nor was any such thing asserted by him in his evidence."
The police found two bloodied knives in the basement suite, which appeared to be kitchen cutlery, not the kirpan (small dagger) that all Sikh men wear at all time. Expert evidence, wrote the udge "confirms...that there were significant bloodletting events in this basement suite, and a trail of blood between the bathroom and the living room that indicates the source of blood was moving through various spaces in the suite."
In his statement to police, Mr Singh said an argument arose when Ms Kaur told him to get a job. In court, he testified that the conflict began when he "proposed sexual intimacy" (he did not say the actual words used) and was rebuffed by Ms Kaur.
Mr Singh said the dispute continued with him telling her to stay home from work so they could spend time together, but she refused. Judge Ormiston noted that evidence was presented in court that Ms Kaur had made statements indicating she was "afraid of Mr. Singh arriving and that she did not want him to come to Canada."
In court, Mr Singh admitted that the couple had a verbal conflict that turned physical. Wrote the judge, "Mr. Singh says he punched Ms. Kaur in the face.... When she left the room for the kitchen, he says he followed her to apologize and that he had calmed down, but she then brandished a knife." Mr Singh claimed he disarmed his wife and put the knife back in the drawer, but alleged that she continued to swear at him and took a knife out of the drawer a second time.
He testified that when he made a second attempt to disarm her, "the knife made contact with his shoulder and he became angry. He Singh says he accidentally poked her with the knife in her stomach."
Mr Singh maintained that he had no memory of Kaur receiving fatal injuries, but an autopsy showed that his wife died of significant blood loss caused by seven stab wounds to her neck and chest. Judge Ormiston also noted that Mr Singh mentioned nothing about his wife brandishing a knife when he spoke to the police. Instead, he told them he didn’t know what happened after the argument.
Defence counsel urged the court to find that the accused blacked out with rage during the altercation, so that a conviction for manslaughter rather than murder would be just.The trial evidence focused on the issue of intent, specifically whether the Crown proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr Singh had the intent required to be convicted of murder.
Two witnesses testified that Mr Singh told them he had killed Ms Kaur, one testifying that he said, "I finished her off because she was deceiving me."
Judge Ormiston found Mr Singh's testimony "untrustworthy and unreliable [and] incapable of raising any reasonable doubt about murderous intent, about Ms Kaur provoking Mr Singh in the way he described, or about such provocation causing him to suddenly experience an overwhelming loss of control that is legally excusable." As well, on the issue of memory loss, the judge wrote that "there is no basis to find that Mr. Singh perpetrated an unremembered attack on Ms. Kaur."
The case of R v Singh will be back on the court docket on October 19th, by which time a psychiatric assessment is supposed to be completed, and presented as part of a sentencing hearing. Defence counsel is expected to suggest a sentence of less than six months, so that the wife-murdering Mr Singh will not be at risk of deportation.
