LONDON:
The son of a 38-year-old British Sikh woman, sentenced to death in India for poisoning and slitting her husband’s throat in 2016, has said that his mother “deserves to be hanged” for doing an “evil thing”.
Ramandeep Kaur Mann from Derby was found guilty of murdering her husband Sukhjit Singh, 34, by a court in Uttar Pradesh last month after their teenage son Arjun – who witnessed the murder when he was nine – testified against his mother.
Kaur reportedly connived with her lover Gurpreet Singh to kill Sukhjit for his 2 million pound life insurance and property in the UK and India.
Arjun Singh, 17, told the Daily Mail that Ramandeep stopped being a mother to him and his younger brother the moment she murdered their father.
“There are not many children who watch their mother kill their father and then give evidence about it. How do you try and get on with your life after something like this? I’ve had to be very brave and I’m proud of what I’ve done because I’ve got justice for my father,” Arjun told the British daily.
The court heard during the trial that Ramandeep planned a month-long family vacation to Shahjahanpur with her husband and two children.
She colluded with her lover Gurpreet Singh, a resident of Kapurthala, and laced her husband’s biryani with poison before slitting her husband’s throat.
Arjun described to the court seeing his mother smother his father with a pillow, and Gurpreet hitting him on the head with a hammer.
“I remember the two of them then had a conversation saying, ‘He’s still alive. We’ve got to finish him off’. My mum then took the knife and slit his throat,” Arjun said.
Arjun said he lay frozen, terrified that if he spoke Gurpreet might kill him too, the Daily Mail report said.
Speaking of his mother’s death sentence, Arjun said: “I would like to be there when it happens. It doesn’t fill me with fear, in fact, it would give me a lot of satisfaction and relief and I look forward to that day. I would like all my family to be there with me. I would like to see with my own eyes that justice for my father has been served.
“She deserves to be hanged because she did such an evil thing. She’s written us letters, but we don’t even read them. We just tear them up and throw them in the bin. Why would we want anything to do with a woman who has taken our father away from us?”
Along with his 13-year-old brother Aaron, Arjun now lives with their paternal uncle and aunt in a seven-bedroom home in the Midlands.
Ramandeep, who is imprisoned in Shahjahanpur District Jail where she shares a cell with 55 other female inmates and sleeps on the floor, is appealing her death sentence.
Speaking to the Daily Mail earlier, Ramandeep said that she had been “framed”.
“I have suffered a miscarriage of justice. I haven’t done anything wrong. I was framed and now I’m rotting in this jail. Nobody from the British High Commission has come to visit me since I’ve been convicted. My parents were here but they’ve now gone back to the UK,” she said.
