Lucknow: Seven years after a 35-year-old NRI, Sukhjeet Singh, was murdered by his wife Ramandeep Kaur Mann, a UK national, with the help of his childhood friend Gurpreet Singh alias Miththu, the court of additional district judge Pankaj Kumar Srivastava in UP’s Shahjahanpur has awarded the death penalty to the wife and life imprisonment to Miththu following a testimony by the victim’s nine-year-old son.
The crime took place on September 2, 2016. To realise her plan, Ramandeep plotted a month-long family vacation in UP with her husband of 11 years and two kids aged six and nine. She poisoned the entire family before slitting her husband’s throat. But that night, one person had skipped the dal-rice for Maggi — her elder son and eventual eyewitness to the crime. In 2016, the boy had told : “My dad was great but my mom was bad and I don’t want to see her face ever because she killed my dad in front of my eyes. She kept a pillow on my dad’s face and asked Gurpreet to slit his throat.”
The report on the boy’s claims was crucial to the case and local police later filed a supplementary chargesheet with the testimony. Both Ramandeep and Miththu were found guilty by the court under IPC sections 302 (murder) and 34 (criminal acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention). Section 4/25 of the Arms Act was also charged against Miththu.
Terming the case “rarest of rare”, the judge in his order on Saturday observed that “it wasn’t just one man who died that day (September 2, 2016)”. Justice Srivastava said, “…only Sukhjeet was not murdered but the remaining years of an elderly widow was killed, the childhood as well as the youth of two minor children was exterminated. The children have lost the happiness which they had when their father was alive. This incident has killed the trust of a son in his mother. This is not one murder but multiple murders just for the sake of an illicit relationship.”
The court also imposed Rs 5 lakh fine on the wife and Rs 3.10 lakh on Miththu, which would be given as compensation to Sukhjeet’s mother. Singh added: “The court said the elderly mother of Sukhjeet should see her son in her grandsons and spend her remaining life peacefully and fearlessly…”
