Ozi Indian
Two 24-year-old Indo-Canadian Sikhs have been sentenced for their role in the 2019 targeted killing of a man in British Columbia over a drug debt, a media report said.
Andrew Baldwin, 30, who used and trafficked drugs, was stabbed to death on November 11, 2019, as he watched a movie with a friend in a basement apartment at Whalley in the Surrey city of British Columbia.
Munroop Hayer, the fourth person involved in the killing, has been charged with first-degree murder and is yet to face trial.
Justice Martha M Devlin wrote in her judgments that Bottomley, Hothi and Baldwin worked for a fourth man in the local drug trade, and were asked by the latter to pick up Bottomley and drive him to collect on a drug debt.
Hothi called his friend, Basran, who had a Ford F150 truck, to do the driving, without telling Basran where they were going.
The next day, Basran took his car into a detailer to be professionally cleaned, and sent a photograph of it to Hothi.
While sentencing Hothi, judge Devlin noted: “It is because of his awareness of the routine violence of this trade that he became wilfully blind as to what Bottomley intended to do at the scene of the homicide.”
She added that Hothi “actively took steps to conceal or discard evidence”.
