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A Mississauga, Ont., man who was on the run for three years following a horrifying December 2021 attack on a Richmond Hill woman inside her parking garage has pleaded guilty.
Sukhpreet Singh, 26, accepted responsibility for his role in the attack on Elnaz Hajtamiri, who was later abducted from a home in Wasaga Beach, where she had gone into hiding with loved ones.
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Singh pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in a Newmarket courtroom Wednesday afternoon, nearly a year after he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Antonio, Texas.
He was extradited to Ontario last summer to face his charges along with others involved in the attack nearly five years ago.
It is expected Singh will be deported back to India in a matter of days.
Hajtamiri was taken to hospital with a gash on her forehead. Her attackers, Harshdeep Binner and Riyasat Singh, were part of an organized crime group hired to follow and harm Hajtamiri, the court heard.
Police described the attack as a failed kidnapping attempt thwarted by a passerby.
Riyasat Singh was also instructed to record the attack on his phone. He was later arrested with Binner in Edmonton for stealing Ford F-150 pickup trucks. Singh was deported in December 2022 after pleading guilty to aggravated assault.
Hajtamiri was abducted by three masked men posing as police officers on the night of Jan. 12, 2022. She has not been seen or heard from since by loved ones and is presumed dead.
The court heard Sukhpreet Singh first came to Ontario from India in 2020 to study business marketing at Sheridan College, but his education plans were derailed by the pandemic and Singh turned to a life of crime to get by and support his mother and sister in India.
In all, about a dozen men and women were arrested by York and provincial police in the case. The Crown has either stayed or withdrawn criminal charges against seven people in the case, some of whom cooperated with investigators.
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At the centre of the investigation was Hajtamiri’s former boyfriend Mohamad Lilo, 39, who, in May, beat a murder charge by pleading guilty to the conspiracy to kidnap Hajtamiri.
The court heard Hajtamiri had dumped Lilo a few months earlier and he was obsessed with her.
Behind bars since 2022, Lilo was sentenced to another four years as part of the plea deal.
Lilo maintains he did not kill Hajtamiri, but helped others who wanted her dead because she knew too much about Lilo’s ties to an organized crime group that was stealing cars and trucks and sending them overseas using Lilo’s shipping containers.
Singh was credited with serving an 18-month sentence as part of the plea deal. His evidence helped get Lilo’s murder charge dropped.
Singh is now in the hands of border services agents ahead of his deportation from Canada.
