210. The Burning Car Murder | Mundill Mahil & Gagandip Singh

The Desi Crime Podcast

This episode details the tragic 2011 murder of Gagandeep Singh, a 21-year-old Sikh entrepreneur who was lured to the Brighton home of medical student Mandal Mahil under

Key takeaways

• Gagandeep Singh was murdered on February 25-26, 2011, after being lured to Mandal Mahil's house in Brighton under false pretenses of a peaceful meeting.
• Mahil had been sexually assaulted by Gagandeep six months earlier but chose not to report it to authorities, instead involving friends and her police officer brother in a revenge plan.

Main topics

• Honey trapping and community justice
• Sexual assault and victim silence

Notable quotes

"I'm going to go to jail for you for 21 years."

Conclusion

The episode serves as a cautionary exploration of how private grievances, community

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) On the 26th of February 2011, a young woman's phone rang, somewhere in England, and the voice on the other end said something that this woman would repeat, almost word for word, to a friend minutes later, because it frightened her so badly. The caller said that he was ready to go to jail for her for 21 years. He didn't say what for, but by then, a car had already been set ablaze and a 21-year-old man was dead, and within two days, three people would be charged with his murder. This is the story of that one car. That one death and those three people. This is the story of Gagandeep Singh. Speaker 3 (1:14) everyone welcome to the desi crime podcast a show where we dive deep into some of the craziest stories from around south asia i'm your host ashwarya and Speaker 2 (1:21) i'm ariyan and Speaker 3 (1:22) the case that we have for you today is one that involves a concept that's becoming more and more common in our desi crime episodes honey trapping oh Speaker 2 (1:29) ashwarya it's a crime as old as man absolutely because of you know women usually fall prey to catfishing right which is so do men but like you know, men AI Photoshop their pictures on dating apps and all of that. But honeypotting, honeypotting is a skill possessed mostly by female criminals. Speaker 3 (1:52) Absolutely. Our prettiness does come in handy when some of us have nefarious intentions. But Speaker 2 (1:56) I, you know, honeypotting, honeytrapping, whatever you want to call it, is usually a crime limited to the financial, you know, women trying to get men to think with their... body parts that apart from their brain let me just put it that way right and a man is men are dumb we are dumb and we of we're we're you know susceptible to uh advances and seduction and manipulation but at worst we lose our money right yeah Speaker 3 (2:29) loss of life exactly Speaker 2 (2:31) crime episode yeah Speaker 3 (2:33) because some of these catfishing cases that we have covered on Desi Crime, they can get so convoluted and they can spiral so quickly out of hand that unfortunately some of them end up involving a loss of life. And this is an episode like that. Speaker 2 (2:45) Okay, in that case, Aishwarya, take us to this case. And before that, for God's sake, please hit the subscribe button. I don't know if I can honeypot you guys into becoming subscribers, but God damn it, we need those subscribers to really increase. Go hit Speaker 3 (3:03) that button. But before we get on with the episode, we need to let you all know that you can now get early access to all Desi Crime episodes on Amazon Music. To get your fix a whole three days before anyone else, go download the Amazon Music app today. In the early hours of Saturday, the 26th of February 2011, a pair of Metropolitan Police officers on patrol in Blackheath, in South East London, turned up on Angostine Lane, a narrow residential street a short walk from the gates of Greenwich Park, and found a car on the side of the road, on fire. It was a blue Mercedes C-Class, registration V362SCL, and by the time the fire brigade was called, just after 2am, the flames had taken hold of the whole vehicle, lighting up the windows of the houses on a street that residents had chosen precisely because nothing ever happened on it. When the fire crew had put the blaze out and the officers were able to get close to what was left of the car, they opened the boot. And inside it was the body of a young man. badly burnt, lying in the space where a family would put its shopping. Nobody on Angustine Lane that night knew who he was, how he had come to be in the boot of that car on a quiet street in Blackheath, or whether he had been alive when the fire began. And the nearest thing the police had to a witness was a camera, which had caught two figures running away from the burning car at around 2am. By the time the sun came up, the street was sealed off with police tape and a forensic tent stood over the shell of the Mercedes. One resident told a local reporter that it was all very grisly and that it was unnerving to think that something so horrible could happen right at your doorstep. The case was handed to the Met's Homicide and Serious Crime Command, and the senior investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Damien Allan, put out an appeal that same day for anyone who had been in or around Angerstein Lane, who had seen the car arrive, or who had seen someone acting suspiciously. While information poured in, a post-mortem examination was carried out on the young man in the boot. and it proved inconclusive on the question of exactly how he had died. But it established one thing beyond doubt, which was that before the fire, he had suffered severe head injuries. DCI Alarm told reporters that the police were treating the death as a targeted attack and that at this early stage, they didn't believe it was a random killing. And then, on the evening of Saturday, the 26th of February, the police released his name. He was Gagandeep Singh. He was 21 years old. He was from Bexley Heath in South East London and he was the chief executive of a satellite television station called SICK TV. The blue Mercedes belonged to his older sister, Amandeep, who had lent it to him just the day before because his own car had broken down and who had spent that Saturday morning before anyone told her about a burning car in Blackheath, ringing everyone she could think of because her little brother had not come home. Speaker 3 (5:46) To understand how Gagandeep Singh ended up in the boot of his sister's car, we have to go back to the autumn of 2009 and to a hotel car park in Punjab. Gagandeep's father, Charanjeet Singh, was one of the many Punjabi men of his generation who had built a life in England without ever quite leaving the village behind. He came from Atalgad in the Hurshiarpur district of Punjab and in South East London, he had set up a successful business. The accounts differ on what kind of business it exactly was, with one newspaper describing it as an employment agency and another as a packaging firm. But what nobody disputes is that the family was comfortable, that Charanjeet was respected, and that his son grew up watching a father who had made something out of very little. But then, in September 2009, Charanjit travelled to Punjab and on a Sunday night, he was found dead in the car park of the Hotel Country Inn in Jalandhar. At first, the local papers described his death as mysterious. But within a week, the Jalandhar police announced that it had been a contract killing. And the story they told was about money and power. According to the police, a close associate of Charanjeet's from Adampur, a man who had lived with him in England between 2007 and 2009, had been given between 35 and 40 lakh rupees to buy property in Punjab on Charanjeet's behalf. The police alleged that this man had misused that money and then, rather than face Charanjeet, had hired a local man for 8 lakh rupees to have him killed, with 3 lakhs paid up front to a team of shooters. Five people were sent for trial in India and at the time of the events of this story, that trial had not reached a verdict. Gagandeep was 19 when his father was killed. And in a Punjabi family, the death of a father does not suspend the duties that the father would have carried. It simply handed them over to whoever was next in line. Gagandeep became the head of the household. He took over the running of his father's business. He began arranging his sister Amandeep's marriage. And at the same time, he was building something of his own, a satellite channel called Sikh TV, which he co-founded and ran as chief executive. He was also one of the founding members of the British Sikh Student Federation. And in the small world of young, practicing Sikhs in South East London, he was becoming a known name. His mother, Tajinder, has said that he had done so much and that she had never imagined a 21-year-old could be capable of so much. Gagandeep was also Amriddhari, a baptised Sikh, which meant that he had taken vows to live by the discipline of the Khalsa and to wear the five articles of faith at all times. Two of those articles matter to this story. One is the Kirpan, the small ceremonial blade that's meant to remind the wearer of his duty to stand up for what is right and to protect the vulnerable. The other is the Kachera, a white cotton undergarment that's meant to stand for self-restraint and sexual purity. But the people closest to Gagandeep in the months after his father's murder also saw something the community did not. He had become withdrawn and low, a young man grieving a father killed over money by someone the family had trusted, while being expected to behave like a grown man in every room he now walked into. He found himself leaning on a small circle of friends, one of them a man of his own age named Ravi Shokar, whom he had first met at a gurdwara around 5 years earlier, and according to one account, the two had been close enough that Gagandeep spent his 21st birthday with Ravi at the family home. Another friend was an older man, a baptised Sikh around 8 years his senior, whom Gagandeep looked up to as a mentor and addressed as Baji. In the records of this case, that man is known only by the name Sunny. And the third person he was leaning on was a woman he had met online a month before his father was killed. Her name was Mandal Mahil and in August 2009, she was 18 years old and about to leave home for medical school. That is when she had received Gagandeep's Facebook friend request. She had grown up in Chatham, the youngest child of a conservative but well-to-do Sikh family whose roots were still in Punjab. Her parents ran a bed and breakfast on Maidstone Road. Her elder sister had become a doctor. One of her brothers had gone to medical school before moving into IT, and her other brother, Harinder, had joined the police. At Rochester Grammar School, Mahil was known as the kind of student that teachers remembered, coming out of her GCSEs with 10 A-stars and then three A's at A-level, volunteering in an Oxfam shop, working in a hospice and mentoring an autistic child, before winning a place at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School with the ambition of one day working overseas for Doctors Without Borders. She's described feeling, at the same time though, like an outsider. at her girls' school. Her classmates had boyfriends, while traditional Sikh girls were not expected to socialize with boys at all, and a marriage would be arranged for her when the time was right. She knew that. She's admitted that sometimes she lied to her mother when she knew boys would be somewhere, like a school disco, for example. But she was also becoming more religious herself. And at 17, she began wearing a turban and seriously considered being baptized. She went to Sikh conferences, a meditation course, a youth boot camp, and she joined a Sikh martial arts club, where she met a boy, a little older than her, a trainee electrician who went by the name of Ravi. Ravi Shokar was nothing like the people she knew. He wore hoodies, he smoked cannabis, he talked in slang and called people bruv, and he drove a car without insurance, which to a sheltered grammar school girl from Chatham seemed impossibly daring. Speaker 2 (10:50) I mean, Ashware, if that's what it takes to really... You know, be a suitable mate. That's not a high bar. Speaker 3 (10:58) It's not a high bar at all. But he wasn't a suitable mate to her, I guess. That is worth pointing out. This was just a friend. She said she was a bit snobbish about it and that it felt cool to have a friend like that. And she took to calling him her gangster friend. It was a friendship she kept secret from her family. So when a Facebook friend request arrived in August 2009 from a young man named Gagandeep Singh, Mahil, who did not accept requests from strangers, let alone male strangers, noticed that she had one friend in common with this person. And that friend was Ravi. She asked Ravi about him and Ravi told her he had known Gagandeep for years, that he ran a Sikh TV channel, that he was baptised, that he was a safe guy. So she accepted. And now Mahil had two young men in her life that her family knew nothing about. And those two men were friends with each other. Speaker 2 (11:45) I think it's worth pointing out that in today's day and age, if we meet somebody IRL, in person, we go to Instagram to do a background check on them. Correct. Right? Back then with Facebook, it was the other way around where... If somebody sent you a friend request, you would go IRL to do their background check. You Speaker 3 (12:10) would Speaker 2 (12:10) talk to your friends about it. Correct. Who is this person? Accepting somebody's Facebook request for the people back then. I mean, it's not that long ago, but it's more than a decade plus. Yeah, the social media Speaker 3 (12:21) landscape was drastically different back then. You're Speaker 2 (12:24) literally letting somebody into your life. The notion of followers versus friends, those are two very different things. Facebook friends were friends. Followers are just randos on the internet. Speaker 3 (12:37) Now the accounts differ slightly on where she and Gagandeep first met in person after the friend request. A court report placed it at a Sikh festival in Wolverhampton late in 2009, while Mahil's own account says, It was only a few weeks after the friend request. What she has said about him that stuck with her was that he was ambitious, respectful and progressive and that she admired how active he was in Sikh youth work. Then, not long after they met, the news came from Jalandhar that his father had been shot and the young man she had only just gotten to know. began to come apart. By Mahil's account, over the years that followed, she became less a friend to Gagandeep, more a counsellor, the person he called when things were bad. But Gagandeep saw it differently. He told her. He loved her. She didn't feel the same way, but she valued that friendship and she worried about him. And she's described him as becoming more and more needy and more possessive as the months went on. By now, she was living in Brighton, in a shared student house at 45 Gladstone Place, just off the Lewis Road, with a group of other medical students. And here is where Kakandeep started turning up without warning and told her that if he could not see her, he'd kill himself. To her, it soon stopped feeling like a friendship or love or a needy man, but became more like emotional blackmail. Meanwhile, her own life at university was full. She threw herself into student societies, including the Students Stop AIDS campaign, and she began training for a half marathon to raise money for the Anti-Slavery International Organisation. And then, in the summer of 2010, for the first time in a life built on acing exam results, Mandal Mahal failed an exam. The retest for that exam was set for August when her housemates were away for the summer. And so, for a few days in August 2010, she was alone in that house on Gladstone Place, just revising. Then, on the night before her retest, Gagandeep turned up at her house unannounced. He had brought her flowers and he wished her luck for the exam. But then he told her that one of the headlights on his car had failed and asked whether he could stay the night rather than drive back to London in the dark. She was reluctant. but he persisted and in the end she told him that he could sleep in the lounge. She fetched him a blanket and told him she needed to revise so she headed back to her room. But then she says Gagandhi began to cry and that he typed a message on his phone and asked her to read it. The text was, I think you should go or I will rape you. She dismissed it at the time as a strange and sick joke. But over the next few hours, as she tried to work in her room, he kept coming in. And at one point, she told him he could have the bed and took her books and laptop out to the lounge. But then he followed her there and she went back to her room in frustration. Eventually, exhausted, she fell asleep on her bed. She says the next thing she knew,