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A religious extremist already serving a lengthy sentence for a plot to kill an outspoken Auckland radio host has had his jail term extended after pleading guilty to beating three of his own parishioners nearly a decade ago.
Disgraced Sikh temple leader Gurinderpal Singh Brar, 49, bowed to asmall crowd of family and friends as he was escorted by security into a Manukau District Court dock today - bringing to a close a year-long legal process that, for fair-trial reasons, had been kept largely under wraps due to suppression orders.
The radio host - whose political and religious commentaries have garnered him hundreds of thousands of listeners, as well as a fair amount of critics including Brar - survived more than 40 stab wounds in December 2020 after he was ambushed by a group of strangers in the driveway of his Wattle Downs home.
After years of recovery that included hundreds of stitches and multiple surgeries, he testified against Brar at the attempted murder trial.
High Court Justice Mark Woolford sentenced Brar in November to 13-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, just six months shy of the 14-year max for the attempted murder, which the judge described as having “all the hallmarks of religious fanaticism”.
Brar would have received the maximum sentence had he not been owed a six-month credit for the time he spent on electronically monitored bail awaiting trial, the judge said at the time.
“Sentencing in this context requires a different approach,” Justice Woolford explained, also ordering a nine-year non-parole period.
“The emphasis must be placed on protecting the community from further violence and it is essential to send a strong message of deterrence to others.”
The stakes were not nearly as high for the defendant at this week’s hearing, as he faced sentences of up to five years each for three counts of assault with a weapon. Crown prosecutor Luke Radich conceded that, given his already lengthy prison sentence for attempted murder, sentences of no more than a year were warranted.
All three assaults date back to two days in April 2015, five years before the radio host attack.
Auckland-based Sikh religious leader Gurinderpal Brar appears in the High Court at Auckland in September 2023 for his attempted murder trial. Jurors found him guilty of orchestrating the knife attack on radio host Harnek Singh. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Court documents state he beat the congregation members with tree branches, leaving each man with facial bruising. One of the men, who was also attacked with a metal utensil used to stir food, also suffered a bloody nose and swollen eye.
All of the men now live overseas. None provided victim impact statements.
The offending came to light years later in the course of investigating the 2020 attack, so prosecutors did not have photos of the men’s injuries or the branches used. Without such evidence, Judge Sanjay Patel said it would be difficult for him to determine if the branch “was potentially lethal or if it was a twig”. The Crown agreed and conceded Brar should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Defence lawyer Dale Dufty asked the judge to apply a good character credit, taking into consideration Brar’s life and community achievements at the time of offending rather than the legal woes that followed years later. He conceded that the sentence would likely have to be stacked on top of Brar’s existing sentence rather than served concurrently.
“There’s no doubt that you have contributed to the Sikh community,” the judge told Brar - listing off his temples in Auckland and Rotorua, his work with delivering food parcels and the educational and language opportunities he encouraged among his followers.
The judge allowed discounts for his guilty pleas and prior good behaviour but declined a discount for remorse because Brar, although having pleaded guilty, later told a pre-sentence report writer that he wasn’t responsible for the beatings.
Had Brar not already been serving a lengthy prison sentence, the judge said he would have ordered a stand-alone sentence of 13 months for the assaults. He instead ordered a six-month prison sentence, which he said would have been the likely uplift had the attacks been considered during his High Court sentencing.
He ordered that the sentence be cumulative to his current prison term, bringing Brar’s total combined sentences to 14 years.
Jurors were repeatedly reminded during last year’s attempted murder trial of Brar’s high-ranking status among New Zealand’s roughly 45,000 adherents to Sikhism, especially among those “towards the more fundamentalist end of the spectrum”.
A promotional shot for the Radio Virsa NZ station to the Auckland Sikh community. Host Harnek Singh is pictured centre. Photo / Supplied
Brar moved to New Zealand in 2002 and started his own transport business, eventually holding prayer groups in his living room on Friday nights. Within a few years his charismatic leadership within the religious community generated enough interest to build his own temple, then two. The facilities, in Rotorua and East Tāmaki, have attracted thousands of regular worshipers.
His popularity extended overseas, where he would sometimes deliver paid speeches, prosecutors said during the attempted murder trial, describing him as someone who “inspired devotion and obedience”.
Those details, however, could not be reported at the time of the trial because of the then-pending assault case in Manukau District Court. Revealing him as an attempted murder defendant would potentially prejudice a jury if he was later to go to trial for the assault charges, the court had decided. The media could not name Brar nor describe him as a religious or temple leader.
He was instead described during the trial in broader terms: As someone who had developed a hatred for the radio host due to their starkly different interpretations of Sikhism.
The suppression lifted late last year, after Brar opted to plead guilty to the assaults rather than sit through a second trial.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
