Man accuses relatives of trying to kill him
More than 15 years after being shot and left to die in India, Brinder Rai still wakes up haunted by the experience.
The Calgary man has filed a lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court accusing some of his B.C. relatives of an attempted honour killing.
The 37-year-old businessman and father of two young children, who was born in B.C., says he, his siblings and mother were abandoned by his father at a young age.
His great-grandfather deeded to him some ancestral land from his estranged father’s village in the Punjab, a move, he says, that infuriated his father, grandfather and uncle, who felt their honour was damaged.
“Basically, they tried to kill me and take my honour from me,” he said in an interview.
On a trip to India in June 1996, on a road that crossed through his property, the Jeep in which he was a passenger was stopped in an ambush.
When he stepped out of the vehicle, his grandfather, Zora Singh Rai, held him at gunpoint with a shotgun, and said, “Now you will die,” and pulled the trigger, he says in the suit.
The shot pierced his right lung and diaphragm, perforating his stomach, spleen, gallbladder, liver and some of his intestines.
“I died a million times. From when I got shot to the time I went into the OR, it seemed like a million years.”
Another man, Harbhajan Singh, who accompanied Zora Singh Rai to the plaintiff’s property, was shot and killed, says the plaintiff.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Rai says, he was transferred from hospital to jail and had his Canadian passport confiscated. He was accused in Singh’s murder along with others, but was released on bail, staying in India for more than three years to exonerate himself and his co-accused.
Since the shooting, he says, he has received death threats.
The lawsuit alleges that Rai was deliberately and maliciously assaulted and battered. It names Zora Singh Rai, a resident of Richmond, and five other relatives as defendants.
Brinder Rai is seeking general, special and punitive damages.
Zora Singh Rai could not be reached for comment.
Brinder Rai’s father, Gurlal Singh Rai, a resident of Langley and one of the defendants, said he hadn’t yet been served with the lawsuit, but denied the allegations.
“He got shot by somebody else,” he said. “It was not my father. He was too old.”