ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

Prosecutor Demands Killer Skinheads Get No Mercy

A P Kamath in Surrey, British Columbia

Nirmal Singh Gill was the only breadwinner in the family, and the meager $ 20,000 he earned a year as the caretaker of a gurdwara here, considerably helped his family in India that included a disabled son.

Last year, as the 62-year-old man struggled to save himself, he clung to his bracelet but the five skinheads -- members of a racist Neo-Nazi movement -- who beat him, ripped it off his wrist, and killed him.

"There's no safe place any more," a nephew of the murdered man, said addressing a judge on Monday.

"He was hanging on to the bracelet to the last minute to save his religious beliefs," Harbans Gill said. "He had no enemies. Everybody has a right to live in spite of their skin color or country of origin."

Harbans Gill was offering a victim impact statement before the judge could decide on the length of the imprisonment. The defense would present its own version this week. The five have admitted to killing Nirmal Singh Gill, and the crown counsel (prosecutor) has been presenting mounds of evidence to show that the five are unrepentant. He is also demanding that they be given the life sentence as warranted by the new Canadian law dealing with racial crimes.

Robert Kluch, Radoslaw Synderek, Daniel Miloszewski, Nathan LeBlanc and Lee Nikkel have also pleaded guilty to the January 1998 beating. The case is the first of its kind in which the prosecution is arguing for a more severe penalty because the crime was motivated by hatred or racial bias.

Crown lawyer Ron Caryer, calling the skinhead's "cavalier and arrogant" attitude even after confessing to the murder, said: "The Crown takes the position that the five accused readily resorted to violence with alarming regularity."

But the lawyers for the defendants are expected to argue that their clients are genuinely sorry for the murder -- and that they should get lighter sentences.

Pointing to the heads of the skinheads, Caryer said it was "insulting" that they were attending the hearing with their hair grown. It was an attempt to convince the court they no longer embraced white supremacist ideology, Caryer said, asking the court not to be fooled by the tactic.

Crown prosecutor Mellissa Gillespie also said one of the five skinheads, Nathan LeBlanc, wrote a letter while he was in prison awaiting trial, praising a white supremacist in Texas who is facing the death penalty for dragging an African American man to death.

In Texas John William King was convicted early this year of tying the man to the back of his truck and dragged him for three miles until the man was decapitated.

"You should have been given a medal," LeBlanc wrote to King.

Court was also told that when LeBlanc was arrested police searched his home and discovered a 12-gauge shotgun, a shotgun belt with live rounds in it. There were also boxes of slugs, a gun magazine holding live rounds of ammunition and a large cardboard box containing a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun.

Earlier the court had heard that the five had talked about blowing up a gurdwara if they were to be arrested.

On a video tape presented earlier in court, Kluch told undercover police officers that he and his skinhead friends could be reliable contract killers because "we've got the killer instinct". He joins Synderek and Miloszewski in boasting on the videotape about their roles in Nirmal Singh Gill's murder.

Caryer, who presented the video tape to the court on Monday, asserted their "callous and unremorseful" attitude towards Gill's death was ample indication of their intolerance. Caryer was aware that the defense could argue that the men were drunk and indulging in exaggeration.

The Crown counsel asserted the skinhead's "voices, posture and demeanor in no way showed intoxication."

EARLIER FEATURE:
Prosecutor Seeks Life Sentence For Gill's Killers

Previous: 'Oliver's Law' Proposed To Expose Bad Nannies

Tell us what you think of this report