Canada Man In Custody After His Wife Stabbed To Death

Archived_Member16 · Jul 29, 2011

July 29, 2011
Man in custody after his wife stabbed to death

Husband of administrative assistant for weekly newspaper to appear in court today

By Andrea Woo And Medha, Vancouver Sun;With a file from Matthew Robinson - July 29, 2011 3:07

An RCMP officer puts up crime scene tape after a person was fatally stabbed at an
Indo-Canadian newspaper in Surrey B.C., on Thursday July 28, 2011.
Darryl Dyck for The Globe and Mail

The husband of a woman slain in a Surrey newspaper office Thursday is to appear in court today in connection with her death.

RCMP did not release the 26-year-old man's name, but confirmed he was the husband of the victim, Ravinder Bhangu, whom he married in 2009.

Bhangu, a 24-year-old Surrey resident, was an administrative assistant at the weekly English/ Punjabi Sach Di Awaaz, where she was attacked Thursday morning.

Friends who spoke with The Sun said Bhangu came to Canada about three years ago. They said she told them of marital problems and moved in with her aunt two or three months ago.

Police said the motive of the attack did not appear to be related to the business for which Bhangu worked.

Police were called to the newspaper, located on the second floor of a strip mall in the 8100block of 128th Street, shortly before 11 a.m., after there were reports of a stabbing.

They confirmed shortly afterward that one person had died at the scene of multiple stab wounds and another had been taken into custody. A third person, who had tried to help Bhangu, suffered minor injuries in the incident and was later released from hospital.

Baljinder Gill, a good friend of Bhangu's, described her as very quiet. "She never used to talk too much. One day I said, 'Why did you move to your auntie's house?' and she cried, but didn't say much to me. I didn't find myself very comfortable to ask further.

"I can't see anybody nicer than her," Gill said.

"Whatever you ask her, very politely, she'll answer you back. If you tell her to do something, she'll do it for you."

Bhangu and Gill taught Punjabi folk dance classes to young children at Shan-E-Punjab arts club in Surrey, where he'd once met her husband.

"I met him once - he dropped her off at the class. He looked fine to me. He said, 'Hello, how are you.' If she had shared something with us we could have known better, but she didn't share much with us."

Gill said it will be very difficult to explain to the children today, when the next class is to be held, why Bhangu is not there.

"It's going to be a big shock for those kids," Gill said through tears.
"I don't know how we're going to tell them."

Dozens of people stood around the newspaper office on Thursday afternoon as police cordoned off the area and interviewed witnesses.

Many on the scene were crying and consoling one another.

awoo@{censored} medha@{censored}

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

source: http://www.{censored}/news/custody+after+wife+stabbed+death/5177958/story.html

Archived_Member16 · Jul 29, 2011

Woman killed with axe and cleaver
in front of colleagues at Surrey newspaper

By Andy Ivens, The Province - July 29, 2011 10:49 AM

Ravinder Kaur Bhangu, 24, was allegedly killed by her husband, Sunny Bhangu, 26,
when he arrived at the Sach Di Awaaz newspaper at 8138-128th Street just before 11 a.m. on July 28, 2011,
armed with an axe and a meat cleaver, journalist Sukhminder Cheema
told The Province.

Photograph by: Sukhminder Singh Cheema, For The Province

A young woman from India was butchered at the Surrey newspaper where she worked Thursday morning.

Ravinder Kaur Bhangu, 24, was allegedly killed by her 26-year-old husband when he arrived at the Sach Di Awaaz newspaper at 8138-128th St. just before 11 a.m. armed with an axe and a meat cleaver, journalist Sukhminder Cheema told The Province.

“The guy came to the newspaper office and suddenly he took out an axe he brought with him and struck her two times,” said Cheema, relating the incident from a source who witnessed the gory attack.

“One of the newspaper employees tried to save her.

“Then [the husband] pulled out a meat cleaver that he brought from his leg, then he stabbed her with the meat cleaver,” said Cheema, a B.C.-based staff reporter for Punjabi Jagran newspaper of India.

“He stabbed her more than a dozen times [with the cleaver].

“She died on the spot.”

Cheema said his source then called 911 and the husband made no effort to leave.

Before she died, Bhangu tried to run from her attacker, screaming, “Save me! Save me!” said Cheema.

Surrey RCMP arrested the suspect at the scene and took him into custody pending his first court appearance Friday morning in Surrey Provincial Court.

A police spokeswoman said the suspect was not co-operative and would not divulge his name.

Cheema said her husband, a Surrey resident, met his beautiful wife in India and brought her to Canada less than three years ago to start a life together.

But they had “some misunderstandings and differences,” he said, and she moved out of their home in April.

“So far nobody has heard that she had a boyfriend, or anything like that. Maybe he was angry because she left him.”

Cheema described Ravinder as “pretty, nice, soft-spoken, a very calm girl.”

He said she started working at the newspaper last November. She worked Tuesday to Thursday at the Punjabi weekly in Newton and taught Punjabi folk dancing at a local community centre on Fridays.

“This is shocking the whole community,” he said. “Everybody is very sad.”

Sgt. Jennifer Pound, media liaison for the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, said the man who tried to stop the deadly attack acted selflessly.

“One might call him a hero,” she said. “In this case, he reacted on instinct, I’m guessing.

“I can only assume that while he was watching this woman being attacked, he felt the need to do this.

“He was really lucky to come out with minor injuries.”

Payal, a woman who works in a shop beneath the newspaper and didn’t want her last name published, said she recognized the man who was taken away in an ambulance as the person who delivers the newspaper to her business, Armaan Designs.

“He was fine. He was doing OK. He was looking around,” said Payal.

“He is a very special guy, a nice gentleman,” she said, estimating his age at about 65.

“This has never happened here before.”

Pound urged anyone with information that could help the probe to call the IHIT tip line at 1-877-551-4448.

aivens@theprovince.com

twitter.com/andyivens

© Copyright (c) The Province

source: http://www.theprovince.com/news/Wom...olleagues+Surrey+newspaper/5174838/story.html

Archived_Member16 · Jul 30, 2011

July 30, 2011

Punjabi woman’s murder in Surrey: Kin allege dowry harassment
Gurdeep Singh Mann
Tribune News Service

Rajpura, July 30

The family of 24-year-old Ravinder Kaur, who was allegedly murdered by her husband in Surrey, has alleged that Ravinder’s in-laws used to harass for dowry.

The deceased’s father, Balbir Singh Bhangu, was reluctant to talk to the media, while her mother had taken ill after hearing the news of her daughter’s death. Balbir said Ravinder had married her classmate Sunny Bhangu, a resident of Mirch Mandi area, in December 2008. The couple then joined Sunny’s family in Canada. Balbir Bhangu, who is district manager with the IFFCO, Fatehgarh Sahib, said soon after the marriage, Sunny, his father Rupinderjit Singh and brother Jagmeet Singh started harassing Ravinder for dowry. “They first demanded a portion of Balbir’s agricultural land and later they kept harassing Ravinder on one pretext or the other,” said MCPI politburo member Prem Singh Bhangu, a close friend of aggrieved family. Rupinderjit had retired as a constable from the Punjab police at Rajpura. Ravinder and Sunny used to study together at Patel College, Rajpura.

During her visit to Rajpura in February this year, Ravinder had told her parents that Sunny used to harass her and her father-in-law and brother-in-law used to approach her with mala fide intentions. The couple separated in April this year. Ravinder started living separately and had taken up a job with Punjabi newspaper “Sach-Di-Awaaz”. Ravinder had planned to leave Surrey and come back to her parents in Rajpura next month. Family members said she had even bought tickets for the flight.

Irate over the separation, Sunny went to Ravinder’s office on July 28 and attacked her with a sharp-edged weapon. Ravinder died on the spot, while one of her colleagues sustained injuries while trying to save her.

source:http://www.tribuneindia.com/2011/20110731/punjab.htm#11

Archived_Member16 · Aug 2, 2011

Civil society eludes us when abuse tolerated

Domestic violence spans the ethno-cultural spectra and we are all duty-bound to end assaults

By Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun - August 2, 2011

Ravinder Bhangu, Rumana Monzur, Maria Catroppa.

Only two things link these three. All are women. All are victims of violence.

All - save one - are dead.

Ravinder Bhangu, 24, was hacked to death Thursday with an axe and cleaver in the Surrey office of the Sach Di Awaaz newspaper where she worked as an administrative assistant. Her 26-year-old husband, Manmeet Singh, was charged Friday with the first-degree murder of his wife as well as the aggravated assault and assault with a weapon of a male colleague who tried to stop Singh.

Monzur, a visiting scholar at the University of B.C., managed to survive her husband's attack while she was at home in Bangladesh. But now blind, Monzur returned to Vancouver earlier this month and must learn how to live, work and care for her daughter without sight.

In June, 76-year-old Sebastiano Damin was sentenced to life in prison. He stabbed his wife - 69-year-old Catroppa - 126 times with a steak knife.

These three women are the most recent, public faces of domestic violence in our community.

In their diversity they highlight the fact that this is a crime that occurs in every nook and cranny of our society.

The abusers are as diverse as their victims. From actors Mel Gibson to Charlie Sheen to some benign-seeming guy down the street, they span the economic and ethno-cultural spectra.

Last month, Peace River North MLA Pat Pimm spent a night in jail after a domestic dispute with his wife. A special prosecutor recommended no charges be laid because there was not a substantial likelihood of conviction.

In B.C., 1,000 women a week report assaults. Over half of all B.C. women - one million people - report having experienced physical or sexual assault. Most of it was never reported.

On a single day - April 15, 2010 - Statistics Canada took a national snapshot of women's shelters. Of the 4,645 women they found there, 60 per cent refused to report abuse to police.

National and international research indicates only about 12 per cent of women ever report assaults.

The reasons are a complicated stew of human emotions. Love. Fear. Shame.

There may be no cure for love, but greater public awareness may help dissolve fear and shame.

Talking about abuse, knowing its signs and symptoms and encouraging women to speak up may help save lives.

That's what Surrey Coun. Barinder Rasode had in mind when she came up with the idea for the city-sponsored Rakhi Project, launched less than two weeks ago.

In the traditional South Asian ceremony - Rakhi - sisters and brothers make visible their bonds of love and respect when a sister ties a ribbon around her brother's wrist.

Rasode and Mayor Dianne Watts have appropriated that ceremony and are urging women to tie purple bracelets around men's wrists to inspire men to speak against the violence that's killing, maiming and traumatizing too many of their sisters, daughters, mothers and friends.

The bracelets - sold for $5 and available only in Surrey - will help raise money for the Coalition Against Domestic Abuse.
Women aren't the only victims of domestic abuse, just the most obvious and most frequent.

Brent Allan Warren, 43, of Campbell River was charged Thursday with murdering his seven-year-old son, Jonathan.

Filicide is rare. But each year, an estimated 800,000 Canadian children witness domestic violence and 40 per cent of them are themselves abused.

On the single day when StatsCan did its survey, nearly three-quarters of the women in shelters had children with them - 3,611 children traumatized by seeing their mothers beaten.

B.C. Lions coach Wally Buono choked on his words when he recently told my colleague Mike Beamish about seeing his own mother abused in their home.

"Fortunately, I was old enough that I could deal with it on my mother's behalf," Buono said.

He was explaining why the football team is involved with an $862,000 federal-provincial initiative to end physical, sexual, emotional and verbal abuse of women.

Lions player J.R. LaRose told Beamish he, too, had witnessed it first hand.

"I've seen my mother abused by a man. At the time, I wasn't able to do anything about it. Now, I'm able to speak up about it."

In one of the Be More Than a Bystander ads, LaRose talks about Canada's 582 missing and murdered aboriginal women. In another, teammate Travis Lulay urges men to defend women and to stand up to men they know who talk about what they've done to their wives or girlfriends.

In still another, lineman Angus Reid calls violence against women a "men's issue" because men are the most frequent abusers.

There are, of course, rare cases - about eight per cent of the reported total - where men are victims. Most are elderly or disabled, who are preyed on by caregivers or family members.

All are crimes of passion, driven by hate, not love.

A mark of a civil society is its citizens' ability to curb their worst impulses for the good of everyone. And when it comes to violence against women and children, we have a long way to go.

dbramham@{censored}

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

source: http://www.{censored}/news/Civil+society+eludes+when+abuse+tolerated/5191633/story.html

Archived_Member16 · Aug 16, 2011

By CBC News, cbc.ca,
Updated: August 16, 2011 1:24 PM

Indo-Canadian radio station cited in CRTC complaint

The Surrey Women's Centre has filed a complaint with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission over a call-in show on Indo-Canadian radio station Red FM.

Spokesperson Corrine Arthur said the complaint centres around comments made by talk show host Harjinder Thind and several callers.

During the popular radio show, Thind took on the issue of domestic violence, saying in Punjabi, "Recently women have taken many leaps forward to gain freedom with the help of men. Is this freedom becoming the reason behind domestic violence?"

The show aired the day after Ravinder Bhangu was allegedly murdered by her husband at a Surrey, B.C., newspaper office.

"[He] then proceeded to talk to several well-known radio shows about allegations that this particular young woman may have been involved in an extramarital affair," Arthur said.

"The community was horrified, including our own staff that are South Asian and listen to the South Asian radio station."
She alleges the broadcast was inflammatory.

"We basically see him and his radio station as a significant community leader and [he] has the ability to really affect change within the community," she said.

"His comments really are exacerbating violence in the South Asian community."

Red FM president Kulvinder Sanghera said the comments may have been misunderstood.

"We do talk shows to bring awareness in the community and the callers have the right to say their opinion," he said. "You do understand the show has to be balanced."

Sanghera said the station raises tens of thousands of dollars every year towards helping victims of domestic abuse.

source : http://news.ca.msn.com/local/britishcolumbia/indo-canadian-radio-station-cited-in-crtc-complaint

Canada Man In Custody After His Wife Stabbed To Death

Archived_Member16

Archived_Member16

Archived_Member16

Archived_Member16

Archived_Member16

Latest Activity