Bogus refugee claimant accused of murder
Maclean’s investigates how a repeat felon, ordered deported 10 years ago, managed to stay in Canada
July 7, 2014
When emergency crews rushed through the front door that winter night—Jan. 21, 2014—they found white tiles covered in blood and two people clinging to life. It was a gruesome, chaotic scene, even for a seasoned paramedic. Whoever swung the blade, again and again, had already fled.
Anita Summan, who owned the home in Brampton, Ont., was lying at the bottom of the main wooden staircase, alert but fading. Summan’s daughter, in her bedroom when the assailant pounced, had sprinted to her side. “She was still alive,” says Sonali Summan, 22. “I was in a hysterical shock, trying to figure out what was going on.”
Steps away, near a back living room, Gurcharan Doal was losing blood by the second. The owner of a Mississauga clothing store, the 46-year-old had just dropped off his nephew, who rented one of the small apartments in Summan’s basement. “I was only there for two or three minutes, that’s it,” Doal recalls. It all happened so fast that he didn’t see his attacker’s face. Doal doesn’t even remember falling down. “I froze,” he says.
Early the next morning, Peel Regional Police issued a warrant for their prime suspect: Iqbal Singh, a Punjabi Sikh who arrived in Canada a decade earlier. By the time investigators posted his mug shot online, Anita Summan was dead—rushed to hospital, but too wounded to save—and Doal was in a coma.
Iqbal Singh (Peel Regional Police)
The manhunt did not last long. Singh surrendered that same morning and was charged with multiple offences, including second-degree murder. Police said the crime appeared to be a domestic dispute (that Singh was Summan’s “estranged” second husband) and the story quickly faded from the headlines.
Five months after Iqbal Singh gave himself up, a Maclean’sinvestigation has uncovered the full, disturbing story of that blood-soaked Brampton hallway—and how a repeat felon, first ordered deported 10 years ago, was somehow never removed from Canada. Now 47, Singh was a failed refugee claimant, a convicted drunk driver, and a dangerous man with a history of violence. Just 12 months before he allegedly butchered Anita Summan, he was charged with assaulting her (inside the very house where she was later slain) and slapped with a restraining order.
Now she is dead, and a man who should have been ousted long ago is an accused killer.
How to get rid of dangerous non-citizens has been a constant struggle for the federal government. The issue reached a boiling point in 1994 after two infamous murders in Toronto: the shotgun slaying of Georgina “ViVi” Leimonis at a Just Desserts café, and the killing of police constable Todd Baylis. Suspects in both cases were born somewhere else, never applied for citizenship, and had previously been ordered deported because of criminal convictions—but never actually removed.
(…)
Reg Williams is the former director of CBSA’s Greater Toronto Enforcement Centre, Canada’s largest. He knows full well that some countries, India included, can take years to respond to a request for travel documents. But he says the agency also has an obligation to exert pressure on foreign states in certain situations, and is “shocked” that more wasn’t done to expedite Singh’s file—especially after the assault, when all his immigration appeals were exhausted. “No follow-up with the Indian Consulate, no escalation to the Indian High Commission, nothing,” Williams says. “The CBSA has a legal obligation under immigration legislation to remove expeditiously. That would imply not letting lengthy periods of time pass by without action. And that’s what happened in this case.”
(…)
