By IANS,
London : Ashok Kalyanjee, an India-born man who killed his two young children in Scotland following disagreements with his wife has been jailed for at least 21 years.
Giselle Ross, the mother of Paul, 6, and two-year-old Jay shouted out to Kalyanjee in Paisley High Court Tuesday: “They were my babies! They never even loved you anyway!”
Kalyanjee, 46, slit the throats of the two boys in his car at a beauty spot near Glasgow May 3 last year, and then tried to torch the vehicle with himself and his victims inside.
While the children died, Kalyanjee survived and was treated for six weeks in a Scottish hospital with severe burn injuries.
Judge Lord Brailsford told him: “This is as grave a crime as can be imagined. This crime was premeditated, planned, organised.
“You used deceit and lies to persuade the children’s mother and the children to go out with you that afternoon. You purchased the murder weapon in advance and acquired petrol.
“The victims were defenceless. No doubt they loved you and assumed you would take care of them as a father should.
“One of the victims witnessed what happened to his brother. I cannot imagine the suffering he must have endured.
“I do not know what caused you to commit it. You were clearly under some form of psychological stress – but you have been examined by psychiatrists and found sane and fit to plead.
“There is no mitigation for a crime of this enormity.”
According to the prosecution, Kalyanjee made a tape recording moments before he killed the boys, saying in Punjabi: “These children are mine and they go with me. This death is near.”
Kalyanjee’s counsel, Paul McBride, said he loved his sons and found it “difficult to understand” what he had done.
In a 345-page diary written before the murders, Kalyanjee “described himself being racially attacked, racially abused and excluded from the family of his children.
“He felt he didn’t want his children to be brought up in that sort of society,” McBride said.
McBride said Kalyanjee was drinking a bottle of alcohol a day at the time of the killings and expressed “a significant degree of astonishment” that psychiatrists had found him sane and fit to plead.