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.
The 33-year-old will pull all her kit and supplies on a sledge (pulk), weighing around 120kg (19 stone) at the start of her epic journey in November, while battling temperatures of -50c and wind speeds of up to 60mph. "I expect the journey to take approximately 75 days. Having done 700 miles to the South Pole, I know I can do 1,100 miles," Chandi, a physiotherapist with the British Army, said.
Three Sikh recruits, working to join the US Marine Corps, fought for an emergency appeal in District of Columbia's federal court to get an immediate exemption to the Corps' boot camp rule of cutting their hair and shaving their beards. The three plaintiffs -- Aekash Singh, Milaap Singh Chahal, and Jaskirat Singh -- want to attend Marine Corps basic training without having to shave their beards or forgo their turbans.
The bodies of eight-month-old Aroohi Dheri, her parents Jasleen Kaur, 27, and Jasdeep Singh, 36, and her uncle Amandeep Singh, 39 were found in an "extremely remote" area near the intersection of Indiana and Hutchins roads. Jesus Salgado is said to have had a long-standing feud with the family and was a former employee in their trucking business.
Indian-origin people across the US have often been targets of robbers because they are believed to have lots of jewellery. The four, who had been under surveillance, were caught in another suburb, New Hyde Park, where they had targeted a house after following a woman, police said.
Claudio Campos, 28, attacked Avtar Singh in broad daylight as he was walking home from work through the Tib Street area of the City Centre on June 23. Campos, who was with his partner at the time, proceeded to walk up behind Avtar before violently punching him to the head. Singh fell into the middle of the road where he stayed unconscious until a passer-by called for an ambulance.
Quoting hate crime statistics 2021-22, Gill, an MP from Birmingham, said hate crimes against Sikhs rose by 169 per cent in comparison to a 38 per cent increase in reported religious hate crimes overall. The 2001 census recorded 336,000 Sikhs living in Britain. Gill said 301 hate crimes against Sikhs were reported in 2021-22, up from 112 in 2020-2021.
