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NRI
woman gets life term for honour killing
WSN Network
 London: A 70-year-old British Sikh woman has been jailed for life
for the honour killing of her daughter-in-law while holidaying in
India nine years ago. Bachan Athwal’s life sentence, pronounced on
Wednesday, for the murder of 27-year-old Surjit, came alongside a
27-year sentence for her son, Sukhdave.
Surjit, a mother of
two, had been having an affair and was seeking a divorce from
Sukhdave when she was whisked away to Punjab for a family wedding
with her mother-in-law. The young woman vanished, never to be seen
again, in the third week of December 1998. After Surjit, a customs
officer at Heathrow, disappeared in 1998, her mother-in-law and
husband falsely claimed she had left the family to enjoy an
adulterous liaison with her boyfriend. They took out huge
advertisements in Indian newspapers seeking her return. Her body was
never found.
It turned out that
Bachan had ordered her brother to strangle Surjit and throw the body
into a river. It was only two years after she vanished that Surjit’s
mother-in-law and husband were arrested by the British police.
The case, which
dragged on for nearly a decade, involved close cooperation between
British and Punjab police forces but the murdered woman’s family
made a statement on Wednesday to condemn the Indian authorities’
allegedly lackadaisical attitude in securing justice for this
unhappy Sikh woman.
In a powerful
statement outside the London courthouse, Surjit’s brother Jigdeesh
declared: “India is no less guilty” in the slow march to justice for
his murdered sister.
The judge sentenced
Bachan and Sukhdave on Wednesday with the stern words: “The pair of
you decided that the so-called honour of your family members was
worth more than the life of this young woman. You, Bachan, were head
of that family. I have no doubt you exercised a controlling
influence over other family members.” The case of the murdered Sikh
daughter-in-law for adultery and shaming the family with impending
divorce hinged on Bachan Athwal’s reported statement that she would
allow such dishonour only “over my dead body”.
26
September, 2007
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