Five gang members found guilty of hacking a 28-year-old Sikh man to death as revenge for sleeping with one of their wives have been sentenced to over 90 years in prison at the Old Bailey court in London.
Amandeep Sandhu, 31, and Ravinder Singh-Shergil, 32, had been convicted of the brutal murder of 33-year-old Sukhjinder Singh aka Gurinder Singh, earlier this month.
Vishal Soba, 32, was cleared of murder, but found guilty of manslaughter and assisting an offender. Kuldeep Dhillon, 26, was also cleared of murder by the jury but convicted of manslaughter and intimidation.
“The nature of weapons used and ferocity of the attack, it is obvious you intended to kill,” said Judge Christopher Moss, after a trial heard how the masked gang members chopped off the victim’s fingers with knives and swords and went on to attack him with a wooden club and a hammer in Southall, west London, in July 2016.
Sandhu was sentenced to 26-and-a-half years’ of imprisonment for murder and also sentenced to five years for assisting an offender, to run concurrently, and Singh-Shergil was sentenced to 26 years and nine months of imprisonment for murder at a hearing on Friday.
Soba was sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment after being found guilty of manslaughter and was also sentenced to five years for assisting an offender.
Dhillon was also sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment for manslaughter and was also sentenced to three years for witness intimidation, to run concurrently.
A fifth man, 36-year-old Palwinder Multani, was sentenced to five years and nine months after he had pleaded guilty to manslaughter and becoming the key witness for the prosecution in the case.
“I hope these sentences bring some comfort to Gurinder’s family and friends, following his untimely death. These men used an appalling level of violence to execute their revenge on Gurinder, following a bitter feud.
“The attack was meticulously planned; right down to the time, location and the disposal of the weapons,” said Detective Inspector James Stevenson, of Scotland Yard’s Homicide and Major Crime Command.
“While we now have five men behind bars, there are still more individuals we would like to speak to in regards to this killing, and I would like to reiterate my appeal for anyone with information to come forward,” he added.
Earlier, the court heard how the four gang members used multitude of weapons that included knives, swords and baseball bats to attack the victim.
It emerged during the trial that as far back as August 2013, there was a rivalry that existed between the victim and a group of men within the local Southall-based British Sikh community.
The rivalry escalated in July 2016 when it surfaced that Gurinder had been boasting about an assault he had committed on Dhillon at a religious festival in Birmingham. Dhillon also wanted revenge as it also emerged that Gurinder had been sleeping with his wife.
On July 30, 2016, Gurinder was ambushed and violently attacked on Spikes Bridge Road in Southall by a group of men with various weapons. The men chased, beat up and stabbed Singh a number of times.
Police were called and Gurinder was found suffering from a number of stab injuries.
He was taken to a hospital by the London Ambulance Service, where he was pronounced dead the next morning. A post-mortem examination gave the cause of death as multiple stab wounds.
