UK: Gay Indian Man Strangles Wife and Incinerates Body

A gay Indian man throttled his wife with a metal vacuum pipe just a month after marrying her to hide his homosexuality.

Bank worker Jasvir Ram Ginday strangled Varkha Rani and tried to destroy her remains in an incinerator on 12 September last year.

Ginday, 30, burnt his wife's body in a garden incinerator but told a neighbour he had set fire to "general rubbish", Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.

Ginday had married to conceal his homosexuality and please his parents, who had helped arrange the marriage between the two.

The defendant had travelled to the subcontinent with his mother to find a bride and met several women before a match-maker known to both families introduced him to Miss Rani, a court heard.

Prosecutor Debbie Gould told a jury the couple became engaged "at the end of a meeting which lasted several hours," with Miss Rani's family believing Ginday to be "a perfect match for their intelligent, well-educated, and attractive young daughter."

Gould said: "His ultimate intention, the Crown suggests, was to play the role of victim, safe in the knowledge that he could rely upon his married status as a permanent excuse for never having to have another relationship with a woman."

The couple tied the knot in a lavish ceremony in India last March. Ginday had confided in a friend years earlier that he was attracted to men.

Rani, 24, moved to the UK to live with Ginday in August, just a month before police found her unrecognisable remains in the back garden of the home the couple shared with other members of Ginday's family.

A few weeks before Rani's death, someone at their home made an internet search for incinerators, Gould told the court. She also claimed Ginday initially told police his wife had walked out on him, after using him to gain entry to the UK.

Ginday admits manslaughter but denies murder.

Homosexuality is illegal in India, as the Supreme Court has recently decided to reverse a landmark 2009 Delhi High Court order that decriminalised gay sex. The law was introduced during the time of British rule in 1861.