Indian man convicted for fatally stabbing wife just six days after landing in Canada

An Indian man has been convicted for fatally stabbing his wife in Abbotsford, B.C., just six days after he landed in Canada. Photo by Diane Crocker /Contributed

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An Indian man who fatally stabbed his wife just six days after he landed in Canada has been convicted by the B.C. Supreme Court.

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Jagpreet Singh, 51 at the time of the killing, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of 41-year-old Balwinder Kaur. She was his wife for more than 20 years.

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Kaur was stabbed through the heart and jugular vein. Her body was found with several stab wounds in her Abottsford, B.C., basement suite in mid-March 2024, according to the B.C. Supreme Court decision.

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During the trial, Singh testified the couple had a verbal conflict that turned physical.

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“Specifically,” wrote B.C. Supreme Court Justice Andrea Ormiston, “Mr. Singh says he punched Ms. Kaur in the face … When she left the room for the kitchen, he says he followed her to apologize and that he had calmed down, but she then brandished a knife.”

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Singh claimed he disarmed his wife and put the knife back in the drawer, but alleged that she continued to swear at him and took a knife out of the drawer a second time. He testified when he made a second attempt to disarm her, “the knife made contact with his shoulder and he became angry.”

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In the ongoing attempt to disarm her, wrote Ormiston, “Singh says he accidentally poked her with the knife in her stomach.” He maintained that he had no memory of Kaur receiving fatal injuries.

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However, an autopsy showed that Kaur died of significant blood loss caused by seven stab wounds to her neck and chest.

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Ormiston also noted that Singh mentioned nothing about his wife brandishing a knife when he spoke to the police. Instead, he told them he didn’t know what happened after the argument. Defence counsel urged the court to find that the accused blacked out with rage during the altercation. His lawyer argued for manslaughter rather than a murder conviction.

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The trial evidence focused on the issue of intent, specifically whether the Crown proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Singh had the intent required to be convicted of murder. However, two witnesses testified that Singh told them he had killed Kaur, one testifying that he said: “I finished her off because she was deceiving me.”

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Ormiston ultimately deemed Singh’s testimony “untrustworthy and unreliable” and ruled that it “is incapable of raising any reasonable doubt about murderous intent, about Ms. Kaur provoking Mr. Singh in the way he described, or about such provocation causing him to suddenly experience an overwhelming loss of control that is legally excusable.”

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Regarding his evidence about ensuing memory loss, she wrote that “there is no basis to find that Mr. Singh perpetrated an unremembered attack on Ms. Kaur.”

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Singh and Kaur were married for over 20 years. They were the parents of two children who grew up in India with their parents. Their daughter moved to Canada to attend university. Kaur came in 2022 to Canada to assist her.

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On the night of the killing, the couple had gone out to temple — or gurdwara — and later a mall. They returned around 9:30 p.m. The prosecution provided an estimate that Kaur was stabbed within an hour of their return.