Indian-origin man accused of killing 4 family members returns to US court
Darpan News Desk IANS, 07 Jun, 2023 02:22 PM
New York, June 7 (IANS) A 40-year-old Indian-origin man accused of killing his wife and three of her family members in 2019 appeared in a US county court for a pretrial hearing with his third defence team, a media report said.
Gurpreet Singh, a former truck driver who faces the death penalty if convicted, is presently housed in the Butler County Jail in Ohio without bond, the Journal-News, an Ohio-based daily, reported.
Singh, currently on trial for the four murders that took place at a West Chester apartment in 2019, appeared in a Butler County courtroom on Tuesday with his new attorneys.
Judge Greg Howard, who had set the trial for April 29, 2024 in February this year, said on Tuesday "that trial date will go forward".
The attorneys requested a second pretrial hearing on August 1.
With nearly two weeks of testimony and 14 hours of deliberation, the first trial in October 2022 did not reach a verdict.
Singh is charged with four counts of aggravated murder for allegedly shooting and killing his wife Shalinderjit Kaur, his in-laws, Hakikat Singh Pannag and Parmjit Kaur, and his aunt-in-law, Amarjit Kaur.
The prosecutors had told the court that Singh murdered his family by shooting them all in the head due to strained relationship with in-laws over money from land owned in India.
Arguing his innocence, the defence team at the first trial said the killings were part of a professional hit due to Pannag's financial woes and a dubious land contract deal in India with the "land mafia", the daily reported.
The defence told the court that three masked men broke into the apartment with baseball bats, and Singh ran for his life.
When he returned, everyone was dead.
However, the defence presented very little evidence to support this theory.
Waseem Maknojiya, who was illegally residing in Houston, had pleaded guilty on September 13, 2021, a press statement by the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Texas said. On Tuesday, US District Judge Lynn N. Hughes ordered Maknojiya to serve 60 months in federal prison.
The number of foreign-born residents increased by 2.5 million over the decade to 10 million. India was the most common country of origin, accounting for 920,000 people, which is 1.5 per cent of the usual resident population, the 2021 census showed.
The 32-year-old James Zhong from Georgia fraudulently obtained the Bitcoin from The Silk Road -- a site on the dark web once called "the Amazon of drugs" -- in 2012. Thanks to state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing and good old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds.
More than 1.4 million mail-in ballots were requested in Pennsylvania this year, he added — 70 per cent of them by registered Democrats, compared to 20 per cent by registered Republicans.
The clarification from the embassy came after queries raised by students and parents regarding eligibility of those Indian students who are pursuing clinical medicine programme in China, for appearing in the qualifying examination in India.
He indicated that he received the information of this plot through the relationships he had formed while in power. In his first address since the assassination attempt on him in Gujranwala on Thursday, in which Khan sustained bullet injuries in his leg, the PTI chief stated that he was aware of the plot to kill him.
