An Indian-origin teenager has been sentenced to eight years in jail by a UK court for trying to buy explosives online to kill his conservative Sikh father who did not approve of his white girlfriend.
Gurtej Singh Randhawa was arrested in May last year after undercover officers from the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) replaced a car bomb he ordered online with a harmless dummy device before it was delivered.
The 19-year-old was convicted of maliciously possessing an explosive substance with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury at Birmingham Crown Court in November 2017 and was handed the custodial sentence by the court on Friday.
“I have no doubt that this offence was motivated by your desire to live with your girlfriend and attend university together. How the major changes in your life that you wished for were to be achieved included endangering the life of your father by setting off an explosion in his car. This was an offence of astonishing audacity,” Justice Cheema-Grubb told Randhawa during the sentencing hearing.
“You are plainly highly intelligent and capable of determined manipulation. You told sustained lies to your girlfriend and her family about your own parents, particularly your father,” the judge noted.