PunjabNewsline.com - Sikh girl in London gets 14 years jail for killling Muslim lover's pregnant wife
Sikh girl in London gets 14 years jail for killling Muslim lover's pregnant wife
Punjab Newsline Network
Saturday, 01 December 2007
LONDON: It was an abrupt end of lucrative career of twenty-three-year-old Sikh woman Harmohinder (Mindy) Sanghera, a student of Dentistry who is destined to spend the
next 14 years in jail, after being convicted for the murder of a pregnant Muslim woman.
According to the Daily Times, Mindy fell in love with Muslim playboy businessman Sair Ali, but when she found out that he had secretly gone through with an arranged marriage to his teenage cousin, Sana Ali, she became consumed with jealousy and decided to eliminate the latter.
After writing hysterical letters in which she questioned whether she was turning into "a psycho", she waited until Sair was out for Friday prayers, confronted 17-year-old Sana, and stabbed her more than 40 times.
In a horrifyingly brutal climax, she then lifted the 11-weeks pregnant teenager's top and plunged the knife deep into her belly. On Thursday, Sanghera was found guilty of murder and jailed for life with a minimum term of 14 years.
The frenzied stabbing of a shy, innocent teenager while she carried an unborn child has horrified millions, but detectives soon discovered she was the unwitting victim of an inter-religious love triangle that would scandalise two communities.
Ali, whose family lives in a large detached house on the outskirts of Bury, Greater Manchester, had been betrothed to Sana, his first cousin, since she was nine.
But while Sana received a traditional, Muslim upbringing in Pakistan, back in Britain her future husband, now 25, was enjoying himself, conducting secret affairs and frequenting nightclubs.
Among his
lovers was Mindy, whom he met in 2005. She is the youngest daughter of a respected Punjabi couple living in a 400,000-pound house in Solihull in the West Midlands.
Mindy was destined for a career in medicine after achieving straight As at King Edward the Sixth Grammar School. At the time of the killing she was approaching the end of a course at Birmingham University's School of Dentistry and had a posting lined up at one of the city's top practices
She and Sair conducted their affair in 135-pound-a-night rooms at a four-star hotel to keep it secret from their families. By last year she was besotted with him, saying she wanted to marry him and have children together. He told her they could never marry because his parents would never accept a Sikh daughter-in-law.
Sanghera, however, was convinced her future lay with him, and talked of converting to Islam. Westernised and previously not particularly religious, she started to abstain from alcohol, began wearing a headscarf and eating halal food.
Meanwhile, for 17-year-old Sana, preparations were being made for an elaborate wedding ceremony back in Pakistan, after which she joined her husband at the family home in Bury. Sana rarely ventured outside, and friends said her only interests were cooking and cleaning.
According to her mother, Maryam Fatima, she was lonely and disappointed in her new life with her Westernised husband, who stayed out late and had little in common with her.
Sair failed to consummate the marriage on their wedding night, and he admitted he would take Viagra before having sex with her, but by the spring of this year it was announced that she was pregnant.
It ought to have been the signal to his mistress that they had no future together, but by now she was beyond reason.
Sanghera would light candle after candle when he was away, never letting the flame die out, demanded that he phone her and speak to her until she fell asleep, and wrote to him saying she wanted to be his "golden girl".
At other times she would make abusive comments about Sana or demand to know whether they had had sex the night before.
Rather than cut off contact altogether, Sair agreed to keep seeing her until after her exams that summer, and they secretly entered a temporary Islamic marriage. Then finally, in the words of prosecutor Peter Wright QC, in her "jealousy and desperation" and frustration at her predicament, "she allowed all reason and good sense to desert her".
According to Wright, Mindy and Sair spoke by phone on the evening of May 10, discussing going away together that weekend. The following day, with Sair at mosque and his teenage brother at college, Sanghera drove to Bury. After duping the teenager to let her in, she went with Sana to the couple's bedroom, produced a six-and-a-half inch kitchen knife, and stabbed her 42 times.
Before fleeing, she plunged the blade into her belly. The baby, a boy who was to have been named Abdul, would have been due last week. Sanghera then calmly spoke to Sair on the phone before returning home, leaving his sister to discover the horrific scene.
