Police in India have charged a Calgary man with arranging to have his wife killed and trying to make it look like an accident.
Jagtar Singh Mallhi, 32, is in custody after confessing, said Davinder Singh Garcha, the senior superintendent of police in Moga District, in the state of Punjab.
According to the Vancouver-based South Asian Post, Kiranpal Kaur Mallhi, 26, was killed last week because she had found out her husband was having an affair.
He was also angry because she refused to have her university-educated sister marry his illiterate nephew, the newspaper reported.
According to the Post, the couple travelled from Canada a month ago to a village called Chuga Kalan, which was the wife's original home.
The couple had one child, a three-year-old girl, Garcha told the Herald. She is staying with the woman's family in India.
"It is a very bad crime for India," Garcha said Wednesday. "The investigation is going on."
The wife apparently confronted Mallhi about an affair he had been having in Calgary, Garcha said. She also angered him and his relatives by refusing to have a sister in India -- who held a post-graduate degree -- marry an uneducated nephew in Canada, the police superintendent said.
Garcha said a hit man was hired for about $5,240 Cdn. The killer was paid an advance of$1,310.
On the night of June 26 at about 10:30 p.m., Mallhi asked his wife to drive him somewhere, the Post reported.
The hired killer allegedly waited alongside the road at a predetermined point and signalled for the car to stop. Then he dragged the wife out of the car and stabbed her, the Post said.
"Her body was then placed back in the driver's seat," the Post reported.
The wife's fatal injuries were not consistent with what she would have sustained from her badly damaged vehicle being hit from behind by a truck, as her husband said had happened, Garcha said.
The car was in very bad shape, Garcha added, but the road didn't reflect any damage. Mallhi was covered in blood but had no injuries of his own, the police superintendent said.
Garcha said the hit man has not been apprehended yet.
"He absconded from his house," Garcha said. "He ran away from his house. I hope that he will be arrested within a few days when he comes in this area."
While still at the hospital, Mallhi heard police were closing in on him and fled, the Post said. Garcha said he was caught at a bus stop and had been headed for Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi.
Garcha said that when Mallhi was interrogated, he kept changing his story and eventually confessed.
His wife was 26 years old, according to a government of Canada permanent resident card obtained by the Post. Garcha said the accused husband is 32. Photographs obtained also show the young couple with a young smiling child.
Garcha said the couple was married for six years, but he didn't know what they were doing in Canada.
Family members in the city said the Calgary couple had been living separately, but travelled to India together.
"I don't exactly know what happened there," said a man who identified himself as the husband's cousin. "I heard there was an accident, that's all."
