A musician (ragi) with a Sikh kirtan group was shot dead outside a
gurdwara
at
Selma
in the US state of Alabama in a case of suspected
hate crime
on Saturday. Raj Singh (29), also known as Goldy, hailing from Tanda Sahuwala village in Bijnor district in UP, had been in the US with the group for one and a half years. He was standing outside the gurdwara when unidentified assailants shot him in the abdomen. The news of his death reached his family Sunday.
Gurdeep Singh, the deceased’s brother-in-law, told TOI, “We were informed about the incident by relatives. It has been five days, and his postmortem is yet to be done. We have reached out to the gurdwara committee for more information, and they are helping us. We have also appealed to our govt for justice and the arrest of the killers.”
While the precise motive behind Singh’s murder is yet to be ascertained, his family believes that it may be a case of hate crime. This is the second murder of an Indian-origin person in the region this month. Earlier in Feb, an American hotelier of Gujarati origin, Pravin Raojibhai Patel, 76, was shot dead after a confrontation with a man asking for a room in his motel in Sheffield, Alabama. In July 2019, Neil Kumar, a 30-year-old student from Kerala was shot to death at point-blank range in Alabama in an apparent robbery bid.
Singh, the sole provider for his family after his father’s death, leaves behind his mother, two sisters, and a younger brother. His family has written to PM Modi requesting his body be brought back to India for cremation.
