Jagdeesh Singh was never going to let the murder of his sister go.
He could have kept quiet about the dirtiest and darkest secret harboured within Britain’s Asian community – ‘honour’ killings. Young women being slaughtered with impunity by their own husbands, fathers, brothers and even mothers for bringing ‘shame’ on the family. Slain simply because they had chosen more liberal Western ways over their own strict moral culture, or had simply followed their hearts and fell in love with a man from a different community or religion.
Jagdeesh’s pretty sister, Surjit Athwal, could have been just another statistic of this ritualised murder, one of an estimated one hundred women who have paid the ultimate price for seeking to emulate life enjoyed by the modern majority in twenty-first-century Britain – yet whose killers were never brought to book. They have become the forgotten victims. Out of sight, and very much out of mind, a veil drawn tightly across their narrow, medieval world.
That twenty-six-year-old Surjit was allowed to disappear without trace in December 1998 during a two-week holiday in India with only a cursory formal investigation remains a stinging rebuke to the British authorities.
Police, nervous about inflaming ethnic tensions, were reluctant to kick down the doors of ancient traditions imported into England from the rural backwaters of the Indian Subcontinent. Politicians were also loath to confront minority cultures for fear of being tarred as racist or being viewed as unsympathetic to immigrant attitudes towards honour and family.
And the dirty, dangerous little secret was allowed to fester. Silence – in the case of Surjit Athwal – was to be her killers’ greatest ally.
But Jagdeesh refused to give up, even though it took him many long weary years to see his sister’s weak but cold-hearted forty-three-year-old husband Sukhdave and her ruthless seventy-year-old mother-in-law Bachan Athwal convicted of plotting her murder, almost a decade after they had ordered her killing by a member of their own family.
Surjit’s life was typical of those of many daughters born to ultraconservative Asian families. At the tender age of sixteen, she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man twice her age, Heathrow minibus bus driver Sukhdave Athwal, a traditional Sikh who wore his beard long and hair entwined within a turban.
Surjit’s traditional Punjabi parents, Mohinderpal and Surinder, had decreed that her education was now finished and that her grandmother wanted to see her wed before she died.
Recalling the day in June 1988 that his sister was handed over in a nuptial pact between two families, Jagdeesh said, ‘She only sat with him twenty minutes before the wedding. On that day, which should have been the most wonderful day of her life, she sat crying, and panicking about moving in with a guy she didn’t even know.
‘But she didn’t refuse. We came from a family that was respectful of tradition. She had no say in it. The tragedy of Punjabi culture during that era was that it was stifling. You were under the psychological control of your elders.’
Yet Surjit had also been brought up in the city of Coventry, and so had been exposed to the dreams and aspirations of her English schoolmates in the West Midlands; but behind closed doors she was expected to live a life of Victorian drudgery, bearing children and rarely leaving the kitchen except to minister to her husband’s needs. It was a life she was not prepared for, and was very unwilling to adopt.
Immediately the couple moved into the home of her husband’s domineering mother Bachan Athwal at 88 Willow Tree Lane, Hayes, in the shadow of London’s main airport, Surjit fell under the poisonous influence of a steely-eyed matriarch who ruled her extended family with an iron will.
The two women clashed over the younger woman’s Westernised ways. Athwal, a widowed mother-of-six and grandmother to sixteen, loathed the fact she cut her hair short, wore makeup and dressed in modern fashions, as well as smoking cigarettes and drinking in pubs with her friends.
Hatred of her despised daughter-in-law grew as vivacious, fun-loving Surjit threw off the domestic shackles and emerged as an independent working woman. Initially she took a part-time job at an airport hotel before undergoing intensive training to become a full-time customs officer, monitoring the vast ebb and flow of travellers passing through Heathrow’s immigration channels.
Within the claustrophobic and explosive atmosphere of the family home, Bachan Athwal’s obsession grew like a malignant tumour.
A damning divorce petition drafted by Surjit as she planned to end her long-suffering marriage graphically revealed the mental tortures she was forced to endure.
She wrote bitterly,
I just really hate my husband. I can’t stand being in the same room as him or his mother.
I fell pregnant in September 1988 and after about three months I had a miscarriage. I was accused of having an abortion and accused of being a murderer, a slut and slag.
Both my in-laws and my husband told me to get out of the house and I went and stayed with my family in Coventry.
In August 1991, I had a baby girl. I thought by getting pregnant I could make things work out but when I had my baby my mother-in-law took the child away from me and got her to call her ‘mummy.’
I was told I was an incapable mother. My mother-in-law snatched her away from me.
Since being married to my husband I found it impossible to compromise with him. Every time I tried talking to him he disagreed and involved his mother.
His family never liked the fact that I socialised with my friends. I was never allowed to leave the house without my husband’s permission.
In November 1993 I left home and moved in with my friend. I was accused of being a lesbian and my husband would become abusive. He would hit me.
It was as if I had married a total stranger. I never knew his interests or personality. We lived with his family and they always interfered in his marriage.
I wish I could get away from this world. I wish I could get away from everything and everyone. I wish I could just go home to Coventry and just sit down and empty all my mind out.
My husband told me he never wanted to get married to me. I haven’t got anyone I can tell my problems too. I wish I could go far away.
Her brother underscored how deeply miserable she was. Jagdeesh disclosed, ‘She told our mother all the other women in the house ganged up on her. They’d tell her she wasn’t a good wife and accuse her of not dressing correctly, not cooking properly and not bringing in enough money. She was completely under the control of the domineering Bachan and had a husband who would constantly acquiesce to his mother. He was tied to her apron strings. It was emotional battery. She said her husband never stuck up for her. She felt abandoned.
‘I spent hours listening to my sister crying on the phone. Surjit was constantly being told about correct behaviour and that she should conform. She was being emotionally attacked on a day-to-day basis,’ he recounted.
‘She was made to feel unwanted. The family would encircle her and tell her what to do. She felt threatened by them. There were three families all living together in a single house run by a domineering matriarch.’
In 1994, Surjit, who had by then taken refuge with a friend, was persuaded to return to her husband’s side after he bought the house next door to his mother and pledged she would get more privacy. But nothing changed and the Athwal clan just walked in an out of her new home at will.
‘She would ring me in tears weeping, “I hate my husband, I hate him badly, I despise him,”’ her brother added.
Starved of affection or even a little understanding, Surjit recklessly embarked on a torrid love affair with fellow customs officer Harvinder ‘Harry’ Grewal at the airport. Theirs was a highly charged and stormy liaison, which blossomed in March 1997.
While his own wife was out at work with a Heathrow catering company, the illicit couple would meet at Harry’s home for snatched sex sessions and the adulterous relationship continued even when an increasingly desperate Surjit set out deliberately to wreck her lover’s marriage so they could be together.
Harry, later gave evidence at Surjit’s Old Bailey murder trial that the affair had been purely physical.
‘She said she was unmarried,’ he told the judge and jury. ‘Then later she said she had been married but had been separated for a while. We would meet at my house. My wife did shifts, so she was always working different hours.’
Four months later, when he discovered Surjit was still married and a mother as well, Harry tried to break off the affair. Devastated, she went into an emotional tailspin, determined to force a reconciliation regardless of the damage she would inflict on their lives.
‘She reacted really badly,’ he disclosed. ‘She started to make phone calls to my office. She would cry about it. She said she was in love with me.
‘My boss warned her to stop ringing me. Then she started sending anonymous letters to my wife and making phone calls to her. My wife received a typed letter saying I was having an affair with Surjit and it had been going on for a few months. My wife was getting lots of letters and phone calls, so she made a complaint to the police. At one time Surjit even called at my home and spoke to my wife.
‘One of the letters stated, “I am writing this letter to inform you that you may wish to know your husband is having an affair. Why don’t you find out the facts for yourself – go and ask that woman who is madly in love with your husband.”’
Despite the seething turmoil within both their marriages, Surjit and Harry simply could not leave each other alone, and, fuelled by sexual excitement, their affair continued for another twenty months, during which time Surjit – who was still unwillingly having sex with the demanding husband who disgusted her – gave birth to her second child.
At the marital home in Willow Tree Lane, Surjit’s brazen cheating sparked a whirlwind of rage and hostility among her devoutly religious relatives. Feelings reached boiling point. They stormed that the woman they branded a ‘slut’ had cloaked the Athwal family in the deepest of shame with her blatant immorality and promiscuity. Her crazed husband even threatened to either kill her or commit suicide as a payback for the disgrace he believed had been heaped on the family name.
But, when Surjit finally decided to end her marriage once and for all and told her seething relatives that she was going to get a divorce so she could be free to be with her lover, her death warrant was sealed. The Athwals decided enough was enough. The ‘whore’ had to die.
While Surjit was out of the house, Bachan Athwal summoned fourteen relatives to an extraordinary gathering in November 1998. Over tea and biscuits the gloating matriarch coolly laid out her plans to deal with the errant, wilful wife. She had elected herself judge, jury and executioner.
Swearing them all to total secrecy, she vehemently declared that the family’s blackened reputation had to be restored. Surjit had to die in an honour killing.
‘Divorce will take place over my dead body!’ sari-clad Bachan exploded, coal-black eyes blazing behind her spectacles. ‘She has brought us nothing but dishonour.’
One of her several daughters-in-law, Sarbjit Jaur Athwal, was to recall later how she listened in terror to the murder plot being hatched.
‘She said Surjit wasn’t getting on and it was causing so much confusion and problems in the family and they were going to get rid of Surjit. It was going to take place in India. They were going to take her to a wedding in India. To get rid of her. Bachan said she had spoken to her brother and he said, “Bring her over.”’
Asked if her own spouse had raised any objections as the monstrous plan was being discussed, Sarbjit replied, ‘My husband was totally against it. He said it should not be done. His concerns were ignored. I was scared.’
As if they had been talking about nothing more important than that night’s dinner menu, the family members then put on their coats and trooped out, bound together by the unholiest of secrets.
None, at that time, had the courage to alert the police. All were in so much terror of the old woman they feared they too would be killed if they blurted out the deadly plan. Her dictatorial authority was beyond challenge.
From that moment, Bachan Athwal’s attitude seemed to change towards Surjit. She became solicitous, urging her to try to patch up relations with her son – and suggested they needed a getaway break to try to steer the crumbling marriage back on course. Where better than a wedding to rediscover the sanctity of marriage vows and the importance of family ties? Where better to relearn the true moral values of motherhood?
Rushed last-minute plans were made to attend the series of celebrations in the Punjab region of India. Although she at first resisted hectoring pleas to accompany Bachan, Surjit was suddenly presented with a round-trip air ticket and decided it would be churlish to refuse the offer of an all-expenses-paid holiday. Even so, she made it clear she remained unwavering in her determination to leave the marriage on her return to London and move into her own flat.
Jagdeesh was nervous about the impending trip. ‘I felt it was wrong,’ he said. ‘I had begun to help my sister with divorce proceedings. On the weekend she left I was supposed to be going over to her house to go through the divorce papers. I rang to confirm and she sounded so nervous on the phone, her voice patchy.
‘She said she was going on a customs course in Bombay but I got the feeling it was something she made up on the spur of the moment. I said, “Why are you going away with Bachan? She is enemy number one.” She said her husband insisted she go as a chaperone.
‘I told her to phone me as soon as she got there to make sure she was safe. I am kicking myself because I should have gone round there that night and seen what was going on. I knew something wasn’t right. It was the last time I ever spoke to her.’
On 4 December, Surjit, escorted by her mother-in-law, innocently boarded an Air India flight, passing for the last time through the airport where she believed her lover would be waiting for her when she got back.
As the 747 jet climbed away from Heathrow through grey, forbidding skies and over the home she so hated, she could not have known it was the last time she would ever see her two children, Pavan, then six, and nine-month-old Gavan.
She was on a one-way ticket – bound for the most despicable and lonely of deaths.
During the flight, Surjit bought expensive perfumes from the gift trolley with her credit card and got slightly drunk on miniature bottles of spirits as her mother-in-law silently fumed in the seat next to her. In the days preceding the wedding, she appeared relaxed, shopping for presents for her sons and spending time in the Sikh temples of Amritsar praying for her family.
But the promise of lavish wedding festivities had simply been bait to lure her to India. The lethal trap was sprung.
According to Bachan Athwal’s own whispered account – which later formed a central plank in the prosecution case – her brother Darshan Singh ambushed Surjit, strangled her and threw her body into the River Ravi, a 450-mile stretch of water that flows from the Himalayas through the Punjab and into Pakistan.
Within four days of arriving in India, Bachan Athwal’s hated daughter-in-law had vanished off the surface of the earth.
The old woman returned to London alone on 18 December, the seat reserved for Surjit on the flight back remaining heartbreakingly empty. In her suitcase were a sheaf of alibi photos and video footage showing Bachan attending a number of weddings.
Publicly, she explained away Surjit’s sudden disappearance by suggesting she’d run off with a lover and was last seen in India boarding a United Airlines flight for a new life.
Privately, within the tight-knit clan, the sinister story was very different. To close family members, Bachan Athwal threw caution to the winds and confided that indeed her vow of vengeance had been carried out to the letter: Surjit’s suffocated corpse had been disposed off. She was never coming back. Life could now return to normal for her and her son Sukhdave in Willow Tree Lane. The gleam of unconcealed triumph glittered in her eyes.
It defies belief that not one relative thought it their duty to report her confession to the police. Despite living in modern-day Britain, they all went along with the wicked conspiracy. Surjit’s murder may lie like a dead weight on their consciences yet they carried on with their lives, concealing the awful truth not only from Scotland Yard but also from her own devastated brother and family.
Jagdeesh Singh was not going to let the matter rest there. He knew in his gut something terrible had befallen his sister. The odd behaviour of the Athwals in the months and years following her disappearance heightened his suspicions.
They told her small boys that Mummy had gone away and was never going to return. Photos and mementos of Surjit were removed from the house as though to erase all memories of her. Relatives were ordered never to breathe her name.
Although the Athwals were arrested in May 2000 on suspicion of murder, they were released without charge. The glaring absence of a body proved a major stumbling block in building a solid case against them. Family members were quizzed but refused to talk.
Angered by the turgid progress being made, Jagdeesh mounted a persistent campaign aimed at forcing Scotland Yard to step up the scale of their enquiries. For years he kept up pressure on the Foreign Office to investigate what he knew to be the truth: that the ruthless execution of his sister, a customs officer at London’s Heathrow Airport, had been ordered by her evil mother-in-law and husband because she wanted a divorce to be with the man she really loved.
Candlelit vigils were held in London and India to keep her memory alive. A website dedicated to unearthing the truth was established under the banner JUSTICE FOR SURJIT.
On 3 December 20002 – the fourth anniversary of Surjit’s disappearance – Jagdeesh handed in a 3,000-signature petition to Downing Street demanding a full-scale murder enquiry. The grief-stricken brother declared, ‘Asian females are regularly murdered if they fall foul of a marriage and male-dominated traditions. Why has she been abandoned?’
He also lobbied the British government to give Surjit’s disappearance the same prominent attention afforded to other British girls who had suddenly vanished without trace overseas.
In a meeting with the Foreign Secretary, Jagdeesh hammered home his family’s unceasing pain at not knowing what had happened to their beloved daughter, urging Britain to turn the screw on the Indian police.
The underlying message was that missing Asian women garnered less attention from the authorities and the media than white girls such as Lucie Blackman, the glamorous, middle-class club hostess murdered in Tokyo. After the meeting, pressure was stepped up on the Indian government and police to conduct rigorous investigations in the locality where Surjit had inexplicably disappeared.
For Jagdeesh, the Athwals’ glib explanation for his sister’s disappearance never cut any ice. It just made no sense. ‘She cared for her children very deeply and would never willingly have left them,’ he said. ‘Surjit was looking forward to her life as a customs officer and was looking forward to a promising career.’
He added sadly, ‘It’s left a huge lingering wound on the family.’
Behind constantly drawn curtains in their home, Bachan and Sukhdave Athwal set about weaving a diabolical web of fraud and deception to cash in on his missing wife and put officials off the scent.
On the very day she boarded the plane for her final journey, Sukhdave had blithely contacted a broker to take out a £100,000 policy on Surjit’s life, knowing she would never again walk back through the door. That money-spinning plan was doomed to failure, though, because the insurance company would not make a settlement without a body. Two other joint life-insurance policies with Scottish Widows were later cancelled, because he didn’t want to keep paying the premiums, aware he would never be able to benefit.
Surjit’s three personal bank accounts with the Abbey National were also changed to make Sukhdave a joint holder after her signature was forged, enabling him to siphon off his dead wife’s hard-earned savings.
The scheming, unscrupulous spouse – who formally divorced his missing wife in April 2001 and remarried a woman called Manjit from Singapore, taking her as his fourth wife – concocted a plot to make sure that the Indian police would shelve their investigations.
In a bid to deflect suspicion from himself, he wrote to officers in India suggesting that Surjit may have fallen foul of her ‘violent’ father and asking them to cease investigations. It was written on Metropolitan Police notepaper and was accompanied by a note purporting to be from the Yard detective investigating the case.
It read,
My wife was having a relationship with the man named
below. She was also dating another man in Hayes. She had a number of boyfriends and her father disapproved of Surjit’s lifestyle.
She would have her hair short in the Western fashion and would drink and smoke.
Her father is a very violent man.
In fact, Surjit’s father, Mohinderpal, was exactly the opposite. Despite having forced his daughter into an unwanted marriage, he was devoted to her – and so determined to find her that he travelled to the Punjab in April 1999 on a fruitless quest after he had been informed by Bachan Athwal that she had dropped Surjit at Delhi airport about twelve hours before she herself had returned home.
During his search he came face to face with the man who would eventually be named in court as her killer, Darshan Singh – but the trail went cold.
However, on his return to Britain, the thwarted father started to receive a string of anonymous, highly disturbing letters pointing the finger at the Athwals. One letter read, ‘Your daughter has been killed by Darshan Singh. She was strangled and her body thrown into the river Ravi.’
Husband Sukhdave did all in his power to stymie London police as they continued to spread their enquiries across three continents. The case had now become an odyssey that took them to India, Norway, Singapore and even Canada during which they interviewed two of Sukhdave’s ex-wives. He didn’t help his trumped-up charges of abandonment against his absent wife by refusing point-blank to hand over videotape of the wedding celebrations he claimed featured her alive and well. His furtive excuse was that he needed time to edit the material because it was ‘embarrassing to show male Sikhs dancing without their turbans’.
Nor would he disclose addresses where he said his wife stayed before vanishing, so detectives could check her movements at specific times and dates, on the basis that ‘my family will be tortured by the Indian police.’ And he continued cynically to paint a dark picture of his wife – accusing her first of being a drug user and then of running off with a man called Raj.
The obstructive Indian police force also caused immense problems for the Yard. It took ten months of protracted negotiations before they allowed London detectives even to visit their country. The trail grew colder and colder.
Naked greed, however, was to be the Athwals’ final undoing. In 2004, mother and son forged papers to remove Surjit’s name from her shared ownership of the house, making them the sole beneficiaries of the property. They then sold the Willow Tree Lane home for £81,794, making a tidy profit of £40,000, which was spread around members of the family.
It was to prove the final straw for Surjit’s sister-in-law Sarbjit Athwal. For almost six years, she had been tormented by having to harbour the secret of the young woman’s death. She could no longer live with the shreds of her conscience. Breaking ranks, she plucked up all her considerable courage and contacted Scotland Yard.
Yes, she tearfully confessed, she had been at the teatime meeting when the murder plot was outlined by Bachan Athwal. Yes, she had been told by her mother-in-law on her return from India that Bachan’s own brother had executed Surjit. Yes, she was prepared to tell all, although she feared for her life and was in mortal terror of her bullying harridan of a relative.
‘Sukhdave told me that if I say anything I will go down with them,’ she revealed, her heart in her mouth, shaking with fright. ‘He was always putting pressure on me. He knew that my dad knew all about it and he said to me, “Tell your dad that if he’s trying to get us into trouble then he’s got to remember that you were there with us.”
‘I could have stopped Surjit going to India but I was too scared. I was worried what would happen to me. I felt I had no power over what was going to happen to me. It wasn’t my choice because the plan was made and that was final.
‘And I was really distressed. I felt very upset and scared they might do something to me, something to hurt me. I wanted to go to the police but I couldn’t go. But eventually I had enough of the family. They were stressing me out over the years and I couldn’t take any more. I had to do something.’
Finally, detectives had the break they were looking for. Advised by government lawyers that they could forge a case without a body if armed with this confession, a specialist squad started making far more extensive background enquiries, trawling through masses of financial documents, increasing the pressure on other relatives to come forward.
The documentary trail of evidence left by the Athwals’ sloppy string of frauds and outrageous lies began to unravel.
The police decided they had enough evidence and, in November 2005, Bachan and Sukhdave were rearrested. Eighteen months later they both appeared at the Old Bailey to stand trial charged with murder and conspiracy to murder Surjit.
Opening the landmark case for the prosecution, Richard Worsley QC gave jurors a broad outline of the festering hatreds that engulfed 88 Willow Tree Lane. In measured tones he said, ‘This case concerns an unhappy marriage between a young Indian girl, Surjit, and her husband. There had been trouble between her and her family and her mother-in-law and she had started divorce proceedings against Sukhdave.
‘Surjit was a vivacious girl and, while working as a customs officer at Heathrow as the main wage-earner in the family, had adapted a somewhat Westernised style of life. It may be that she was not popular at home.
‘It is not in dispute that she had an affair with fellow customs officer, Harry Grewal. You can imagine the resentment that would have given rise to in any family where close family bonds are considered desirable. They were Sikhs – and for the girl to have an affair was obviously something disgraceful. And eventually feelings boiled over.
‘Her mother-in-law, Bachan Athwal, called a meeting and with her son decreed that Surjit must die. The pair devised a plan to get the girl to India on the pretext of going to some weddings. The weddings were bait to get her there.
‘Within a few days of arriving in the Punjab she completely disappeared from the surface of the earth. The Crown suggests she was strangled in India. A family member will tell you that Mrs Athwal returned to England and said that was what had happened – that her brother Darshan had strangled Surjit.’
Desperate to save their skins, the Athwals lied through their teeth. Bachan testified she and Surjit did stay with her brother Darshan but her daughter-in-law suddenly got into a panic and said she had to leave.
‘She had been shopping and bought jewellery and she was happy. Her mood became different and she said, “Mummy, I have to go and do a course. I need to go back to England. I have a job there. Otherwise I will get the sack from my job.”
‘I told her affectionately, “Don’t go” but she said, “Mummy, I have to go, I have to go.”’
Her brother, she swore on oath, gave Surjit a lift to the local airport in Amritsar to buy domestic route air tickets, and that was the last time she saw her. Breaking down, she sobbed, ‘She was like a daughter to me.’
Sukhdave Athwal also strenuously denied plotting to murder his cheating wife. Asked directly whether he helped lure his wife to her death, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, goodness, no!’ He claimed to know nothing about her divorce plans or taking out insurance policies on her life. And he insisted the first he knew she was going to India was a few days before departure when Surjit said she was stressed out and needed a holiday break.
At one stage, Bachan Athwal’s own daughter was reluctantly dragged into court. Treated as a hostile witness, she was so terrified of her mother that she could not face her, and gave evidence nervously from behind a screen.
Jurors refused to buy the couple’s farrago of lies and convicted them of murder.
Almost a decade after they had cold-bloodedly ordered her killing Jagdeesh finally got his day in court, delivering a searing victim impact statement to the Old Bailey.
He used his public platform to tear away the veil cloaking the miseries heaped on those women like his sister who sought to free themselves from the manacles of a life consigning them to little better than oppressed and victimised chattels.
Surjit’s life was viciously struck down at the age of twenty-seven. Surjit had high hopes of getting out of her tragic marriage and moving forward with her two young children.
Today my sister would have been thirty-five years old, enjoying life with her children, free from the strain of an oppressive marriage.
She was punished by the Athwals for standing up to their suffocating control and being assertive. As an incoming wife, the Athwals’ perception was that she belonged to them and everything was to be done their way. She had no rights. Not even to complain.
Surjit’s disappearance in December 1998 devastated our entire family, leaving us disorientated and stricken with anxiety. No body, no answers and no information, except the confused and contradictory lies from the Athwals. What have they done to her, we thought, and are we ever going to find her?
Surjit’s children were left motherless, at the ages of nine months and six years. As a family we went through an emotional roller coaster searching and struggling for the truth. We battled with the incompetence and disinterest of the Indian police, the apathy of the Foreign Office and the slow initial involvement of the Metropolitan Police.
Relatives visiting their home were told not to mention her name, and her children were told she had gone away.
In life, as in death, Surjit was the victim of the Athwals’ venomous anger. Her reputation and disappearance was rubbished both to us and amongst the local Sikh community. They set about creating a fog of malicious lies and misinformation about her, claiming she was prone to going off with men and probably with a boyfriend in India.
They sought to rid the world around them of all discussion and mention of her. All signs, memories and photos of her were removed from Surjit’s own home.
The Athwals had managed to murder my sister and it appeared that, with their manipulation and planning, they were going to get away with it. Her murderers were going about their life as if nothing had happened.
Remorselessly and cruelly, they both fed us lie after lie, all in a sadistic attempt to cover up their crime.
It was a lonely and tortuous experience for us. From start to finish this whole case has been defined by the vicious, deceitful lies of the Athwals.
For us, as a family, the last nine tortuous years has all been about seeking the truth.
Following his powerful statement and on 19 September 2007, Bachan Athwal, one of the oldest women ever to stand trial in Britain, was jailed for life with a recommendation she serve a minimum twenty years. Realising that effectively she had been sentenced to die behind bars, the evil grandmother broke down sobbing, her hands clasped in prayer.
Her downtrodden son also received a life sentence and was told he would serve at least twenty-seven years before being released. Sukhdave Athwal will be seventy years old before he can ever taste freedom again.
Judge Giles Forrester told the murderous mother and son, ‘The pair of you decided that the so-called honour of your family members was worth more than the life of this young woman.
‘How you could commit this unspeakable act I do not know. There was no motive worthy of the name. You did it because you perceived she had brought shame on the family name.
‘In reality, however, you murdered her for no better reason than the existence of matrimonial difficulties and the likely breakdown of marriage.’
When the husband’s defence counsel, Jonathan Rose, told the court he was a good father to his children, the judge snapped at the cowed defendant, ‘You can hardly be a good father if you killed their mother. This was a heinous crime characterised by great wickedness.’
Four months later, a court ruled that the killers could not keep hold of their ill-gotten gains. The judge who had put them behind bars ordered that the cash generated from the illegal, fraudulent sale of the home part-owned by Surjit should be seized from all the relatives who shared in the bloodstained bounty.
Whatever was recovered will probably go in compensation to Surjit’s tragically orphaned children.
Jagdeesh Singh’s cry for justice had finally been heard. Not only were the killers behind bars but he had forced a shamefaced government to confront its own damning inaction and the shameful desertion of its sworn duty to protect all citizens, regardless of race, sex and creed.
In the aftermath of the trial, the Crown Prosecution Service established a network of special prosecutors dedicated to investigating honour killings as police forces unearthed files to re-examine the cold-case deaths of scores of young women from Sikh and Muslim backgrounds strangled, knifed, bludgeoned or set on fire because they had attempted to break free of their old-world cultural chains.
The repercussions of Jagdeesh Singh’s dogged crusade to protect all women from honour killings and those who had been forced to marry against their will have been felt widely across government and the police.
Today, twenty-strong teams of prosecutors have been established solely to investigate these once-hidden, never-discussed crimes of twisted culture steeped in centuries of savage ritual.
Squads of investigators are now up and running in order to rescue young women who are often abducted before being dragged to the altar. Cases will be ‘flagged’ and rapid action taken if the girls are deemed at serious risk of being murdered for bringing ‘dishonour’ on families.
New laws have been introduced under the Domestic Violence Crime and Victims Act, enabling police to arrest and prosecute relatives who fail to protect a family member knowing they face death or beatings.
These new powers were brought to bear when two sisters and their mother became the first people to be found guilty of turning a blind eye to the horrific murder of nineteen-year-old bartered bride Sabia Rani in the home they all shared in Leeds.
For three months, the vulnerable, frightened girl imported from rural Pakistan was kept a prisoner in the house and systematically beaten by her husband Shazad Khan. When she died, she had fifteen broken ribs and bruising over her whole body. A pathologist described her injuries as akin to a ‘catastrophic road accident’. Sabia’s body could not endure any more punishment – it simply gave out.
But, despite her terrible agonies, Khan’s mother and sisters did not step in to help end her suffering. One sister told police Sabia’s injuries were caused by evil spirits and black magic.
Convicted of failing to prevent her death after a trial in February 2008, the trio of women wept and screamed abuse when told they faced jail sentences.
So deeply concealed from the outside world are these crimes that police are employing the kind of surveillance tactics normally used against organised crime barons, with the extensive use of bugging devices and wiring up victims with hidden tapes.
Yet the police stress that the burden remains on close relatives to come forward as witnesses – that family will always hold the key to the crime. One recent report accused whole communities of covering up ‘honour violence’ against women who have been killed, raped and abused simply because they enjoyed banned relationships, or even merely because of their ambition to get an education.
In an investigation carried out by the Centre for Social Cohesion, whose advisers include the Archbishop of Canterbury, horrific crimes were uncovered, such as women savagely attacked simply for listening to Western pop music. Men were getting away with their oppressive violence because many of their teenage wives are so-called ‘freshies’ like the blighted Sabia Rani – uneducated peasant girls imported into this country from rural Asian villages ‘uncontaminated’ by ideas of female independence.
The controversial report also directly accused Asians working in the police and government service of blocking or hindering attempts to eradicate honour killings, or deliberately failing to help women flee abusive arranged marriages, because they fear they are breaking traditional taboos.
Startling evidence emerged of a network of Asian men working in local government departments and social services who kept tabs on terrified women when they sought official help to escape their family persecutors, handing over details of their new, secret addresses contained in highly confidential files to the relentless men hunting them down.
The investigators fired a further broadside at the Muslim Council of Britain, suggesting that religious elders don’t want to have forced marriage criminalised.
‘Almost all women’s groups interviewed said the Muslim Council has done little or nothing to end honour-based violence. Asian women are often afraid to seek help because they know that Asians working in local government believe that women who break traditional taboos deserve to be punished,’ concluded the report.
Nazir Afzal, the lead prosecutor on honour-based violence for the Crown Prosecution Service, revealed, ‘In some northern towns, there are real horror stories – from places like Blackburn, where people say you might as well be in rural Kashmir for the way women are seen and treated.’
For Jagdeesh Singh, nine long and tortuous years on, there remains unfinished business. His sister’s alleged killer, Darshan Singh, remains at large in India. No charges have yet been brought against him, despite details of the case being forwarded by Scotland Yard to the Indian police accusing him outright of being the killer. Jagdeesh is urging the government to hold a public inquiry into his sister’s death to expose what he deems ‘inadequate’ protection offered to victims such as Surjit and its failure to extradite murder suspects from their hideouts abroad.
‘She was driven off in a car and taken to the banks of a nearby river. She was pulled out of the car, strangled, suffocated to death and then her corpse was thrown into the river with a view to it being lost for ever,’ he reflected.
‘The local police proved to be completely uncooperative, completely unprofessional, and their attention to her case was a grudging disinterest, a pure paper exercise.
‘Justice will only be served when the man who took her life faces justice. Until that happens, our family will never rest. Never.’