Jail sentence for road rage death cricketer
A court today sentenced former Indian cricket player turned politician Navjot Singh Sidhu to three years in prison for killing a man during a scuffle triggered by a car parking argument in 1988, news reports said.
However, the Punjab and Haryana High Court in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh suspended the sentence, giving Sidhu until January 31 to appeal to the Supreme Court, the Press Trust of India news agency said.
The state court also imposed a fine of 100,000 rupees (€1,684) on Sidhu, a politician who represented the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s Parliament.
Last week, Sidhu resigned from the lower house of Parliament after the court overturned an earlier trial court decision which had acquitted him and a friend of the charge of killing a car owner in a scuffle.
Prosecutors said Sidhu and his friend punched Gurnam Singh after dragging him out of his car following an altercation. Singh, who suffered heart problems, collapsed and died.
The trial court had acquitted Sidhu and his friend Rupinder Singh Sandhu in 1999, saying the “case against the accused had not been established beyond doubt”.
A former Indian test opener, Sidhu scored 2,013 runs in 34 matches, including six centuries. He joined politics after quitting cricket and was elected to Parliament from the northern Indian city of Amritsar.
