A 21-year-old Indian origin nursing student in Australia was kidnapped by her scorned ex-boyfriend from India, driven about 650 kilometers, and then buried alive in the isolated Flinders Ranges of South Australia state in a horrifying act of revenge crime.
Tarikjot Singh killed Adelaide City resident Jasmeen Kaur in March 2021, a month after she reported him to the police for stalking.
A court has heard 21-year-old Jasmeen Kaur had her hands and feet bound, before being buried alive by her ex-boyfriend and stalker Tarikjot Singh in the SA outback.
— 9News Adelaide (@9NewsAdel) July 5, 2023
Singh was caught on CCTV hours before buying cable ties and a shovel from Bunnings. #9News pic.twitter.com/XSUNMSIJUs
She was taken from her place of employment on 5 March and driven more than 400 miles (644 km) in the boot of a car that the accused had borrowed from his flatmate. She was restrained with cable ties. He buried her in a small grave at Death Rock near Hawker after giving her superficial throat wounds that weren’t enough to kill her. She was blindfolded and conscious of her surroundings when she passed away at some point on 6 March as per the post-mortem report.
Tarikjot had pled guilty to the murder and the gory details of his crime were revealed during motions for sentencing at the Supreme Court on 5 July 2023. After being taken by the culprit from her workplace, the victim was forced to undergo “absolute terror,” according to prosecutor Carmen Matteo SC.
She stated, “She had to have been consciously suffering what could only be described as the absolute terror of breathing in and swallowing soil and dying in that way.” The attorney further added that Jasmeen Kaur was “made to suffer” and that the murder was “not efficient.”
The prosecutor informed that once their relationship ended, Tarikjot Singh began the “cold and clinical planning” of the murder. “The way in which Ms Kaur was killed involved an uncommon level of cruelty. It’s not known when her throat was cut, it’s not known when or how she got into or was placed into that burial grave and it’s not known when that was dug, other than the prosecution says it had to have been while she was still alive and in preparation for her burial.”
She proclaimed, “It was a killing that was committed as an act of vengeance.” She told the court that on February 9, the victim had filed a police report mentioning that the perpetrator was stalking her. She disclosed that in the days preceding the latter’s death, he composed multiple notes to her that he never got around to sending.
They featured sentiments like “Your bad luck that I am still alive, cheap, wait and watch, will get the answer, each and every single one will get the answer” and “deep inside what I feel but can’t get over.”
The day before her kidnapping, he downloaded a map of surveillance cameras in Adelaide, in accordance with the prosecution’s testimony in court. Carmen Matteo asserted that surveillance footage captured him purchasing cable ties from a hardware store on the afternoon of the abduction.
She established that in order to “engage cell towers that would give the impression that he was at or near home,” he also took the SIM card out of his phone, put it in another one and left it there. He switched his car with that of his flatmate on the night of the crime and requested him to cover his shift.
The offender claimed that he did not recall the last time he saw his ex-partner and that he had been at home the night of her murder when he was first questioned by police on 6 March. He reported to the authorities one day later that she had died by suicide and that he had buried her in the Flinders Ranges. He led them to the burial spot, where they discovered her shoes, spectacles, and name badge in a bin with some twisted cable ties.
Two months prior to the murder, both his and her families met and “resolved unfavourably to the relationship continuing,” based on Martin Anders, Tarikjot Singh’s lawyer. He maintained that his reasoning was “gravely impaired” following the breakup of the relationship.
“This is not a man who really was orientated well in terms of his understanding of whose wishes, how those issues unfolded, and how he might reason appropriately through the circumstances of which he was confronted. He took steps which destroyed not only her life but his life,” he remarked.
The legal representative alleged that Tarikjot Singh had poor mental health and had developed hallucinations as a result of the passing of her ex-partner. The latter, as stated by him, posed a low chance of future offense.
He “put in train a series of careful steps over a period of time” to carry out the murder, noted Justice Adam Kimber. “He was punishing her for having been rejected. He, the prosecution says, bundled her into a vehicle, restrained her in the back seat or the boot, drove her a considerable distance, killed her, buried her, and disposed of evidence that might implicate him in that crime,” the judge observed.
Mandatory life in prison was awarded by him to the accused, with a non-parole period to be determined next month. Due to the fact that they called it a “crime of passion,” the defense argued for a lenient punishment. The mother and other members of Jasmeen Kaur’s family were present in court to hear the arguments for and against the sentence.
