A court has tossed out an alibi offered by the mother of a murdered Maple Ridge woman, claiming she never travelled to India to threaten the family of a man her daughter secretly married.
Malkit Kaur Sidhu’s daughter Jassi was killed in June 2000 in the Indian state of Punjab after she married rickshaw driver Sukhwinder ‘Mithu’ Sidhu against the wishes of her Canadian family.
Sidhu, 62, and her brother, Singh Badesha, are fighting extradition to India, where they’ve been charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
In a decision released Tuesday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gregory Fitch dismissed an application by Sidhu to include evidence from her son Sarwan.
Indian authorities allege after discovering her daughter’s marriage, Sidhu travelled to India in late 1999 or early 2000 and threatened Mithu’s mother and his friends.
In an affidavit, however, Sarwan swore “he is sure” his mother never visited India during that period as he was living with her at the time.
Sidhu was also seeking to admit a second affidavit by Canada Border Services director Lynn Lawless, which details when Sidhu last left India in early 1999 and notes there were no other entry or exit stamps on Sidhu’s passport.
“In my view, the alibi evidence Sidhu seeks to have admitted stands in opposition to, but does not directly undermine or make manifestly unreliable the contrary body of evidence presented by [Indian authorities],” wrote Justice Fitch.
“In short, the evidence … does not exclude the possibility that she entered India in 2000, but her passport was not stamped as it should have been.”
The daughter of wealthy blueberry farmers, Jassi Sidhu met her husband Mithu on a family trip to India and carried on a clandestine long-distance romance with him until they were secretly married in 1999.
While in India, the 25-year-old and her husband were attacked by a gang of men. Jassi’s body was found a day later in a ditch, her throat slit. Her husband survived the attack.
Sidhu and Badesha are accused of orchestrating Jassi’s murder from the family home, located across from Jerry Sulina Park in Maple Ridge.
Jassi’s husband, his mother Sukhdev Kaur, uncle Sukhdev Singh and friends Joginder Singh Bhindri and Surinder Singh Singla are set to travel to Canada to testify at the extradition hearing, which began in May.
Snippets of their evidence were detailed in Fitch’s ruling.
They include allegation that Jassi’s mother and uncle offered one friend five Lakh rupees (around $8,000) and volunteer to take him to Canada if he was willing to say that he was not a witness to Mithu’s wedding.