The outbreak of violence at Kabaddi tournament that sparked cartel-style execution of DPD driver - and how 'honour' could have been to blame

Daily Mail​

6 hours ago

Firing guns and hacking at each other with machetes, axes and bats in front of terrified families, it's hard to imagine an outbreak of violence more brutal or brazen.
But just a day later this brawl would spark something far worse - the 'cartel-style' execution of a DPD driver as he went about his daily rounds.
The shocking fight at a Kabaddi tournament in Alvaston, Derby, on August 20, 2023 was compared to a 'medieval' battle by a judge, who jailed seven of the men responsible to nearly 40 years in jail.
This week the killing was featured on a BBC documentary murder 24/7.
The judge said there had been a 'conspiracy of silence' over the cause of the violence, although he read a statement from one of the men involved which stated: 'All I know is that it involved honour from one of the parties, I did not question it, it was justified.'
But whatever the cause of the incident, it would lead - on August 21, 2023 - to the savage murder of Aurman Singh, 23, who was hacked to death by seven men who were armed with an axe, a hockey stick, a knife, a golf club and a shovel.
He was attacked with such ferocity that his left ear was severed and his skull had cracked open and part of his brain left exposed.
A trial heard he was attacked by a gang of seven men who had planned the attack following the incident a day earlier. Kabaddi is a contact sport that originated in India and involves two teams of seven players attempting to 'raid' each other's half.
Mehakdeep Singh, 24, and Sehajpal Singh, 26, both of Tipton, West Midlands, were found guilty of murder following a three-week trial at Stafford Crown Court. Five other members of the group had already been convicted and jailed.
Aurman was attacked in daylight as he made a delivery in Coton Hill, Shrewsbury, after the gang used 'inside' information to uncover the victim's delivery route and hunt him out.
The group stalked his van in a white Mercedes Benz and grey Audi before ambushing the unsuspecting 23-year-old in the middle of the street.
His injuries were so severe that there was no chance of him surviving and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspects fled in their cars before dumping weapons, including a hockey stick and shovel, in nearby Hubert Way.
The police investigation into Aurman's murder was filmed for a BBC documentary, Murder 24/7, which aired this week.
It showed footage of officers discussing the Kabaddi attack and linking it to his death.
As MailOnline previously revealed, the incident came at the end of months of simmering hostilities between groups of young men of Indian heritage that had on several occasions exploded into violence.
One linked event was a 'crazy fight' at a music event in a park a mile from Aurman's home a month before he died.
Aurman, born in Italy but understood to have been of Indian Sikh heritage, lived in a mid-terraced home with his 46-year-old mother and younger sister in Smethwick, West Midlands.
He attended the Sandwell and Birmingham Mela, a two-day festival promoting Punjabi culture, which took place between July 22 and 23, 2023 in Victoria Park in Smethwick.
A former neighbour told MailOnline how Aurman had allegedly been caught up in trouble at the Kabaddi event.
He said: 'I heard he had been involved in an altercation at the festival shortly before he was killed.
'I don't know in what capacity, he may have just been present, but I was told there was a big fight between one group and another.
'A few friends of mine who went to the Mela told me that there had been this 'crazy fight' and people had been moved away from the area by security.
'The kid I was talking to gestured over to Aurman's house and said 'your neighbour was involved, did you know that?'.
'I had no idea but didn't know what to think. He seemed to me to be a quiet man, but a good neighbour. Not someone who would cause any problems.
'I saw Aurman parking his DPD delivery van the day after I was told he was involved in the fight. I didn't know him well so I never asked him about it. I didn't have that sort of relationship with him.
'But a few weeks after being told that information about him I found out that he was the delivery driver killed on his round over in Shrewsbury.
'Reading the details of what happened to him, the fact his killers ambushed him and with such ferocity, makes it look like some sort of revenge attack.'
Derbyshire Police did not have Aurman marked down as a suspect in any fighting but even so his killers are understood to have picked him out from footage, which was uploaded onto social media within hours.
The following morning Aurman got up for work and drove 45-miles north from his home to his DPD depot in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
As normal he loaded his van with packages and then started out on his round. But unbeknownst to him a colleague at the depot - Sukhmandeep Singh, 24 - had passed on details of his delivery route to his killers.
Mehakdeep Singh and Sehajpal Singh drove to Shrewsbury from their homes in Tipton, West Midlands, in a white Mercedes Benz. With them were Harpreet Singh and Harwinder Singh Turna, both of whom remain at large.
Four other men - Arshdeep Singh, 24, Jagdeep Singh, 23, Shivdeep Singh, 27, and Manjot Singh, 24 – followed in a grey Audi.
They carefully tailed Aurman through the historic Shropshire county town to a quiet suburban area in Coton Hill, where he pulled up just before 1pm and got out of his van to start unloading the packages.
The Mercedes parked up behind and Harwinder was the first out, charging at Aurman and his startled colleague with a metal bar.
The colleague ran off in terror and Harwinder hurled the bar at Aurman as he too tried to flee, the impact of which caused him to lose balance and tumble to the floor.
Circling around him – several clutching weapons – they moved in on their hapless victim, chopping him with an axe, stabbing him and beating him mercilessly with a hockey stick, shovel and golf club.
The attackers left him in a bloodied heap in a side-road. Residents who found him called an ambulance but his injuries were too severe and he died at the scene.
Both the Mercedes and Audi drove off at speed.
During his trial at Stafford Crown Court, Sehajpal said an argument broke out during their getaway between his co-defendant Mehakdeep and Harwinder about the metal bar being thrown and his fingerprints being on it.
The suspects later abandoned their cars and dumped their weapons. Sehajpal and Mehakdeep then booked a cab to Shrewsbury rail station, where they met some of the others who had travelled there by bus.
They travelled as a group to Wolverhampton. When asked what the atmosphere was like during the journey, Sehajpal said: 'It was stressed. We were also panicking.
'There was not much talking between us.'
Sehajpal told jurors Mehakdeep booked an Uber to a friend's flat in High Street, Tipton, for the both of them.
He recalled how he was at the flat when he discovered Aurman had died, adding: 'My friend was using his mobile phone and then he saw a DPD driver was dead in Shrewsbury.
'Then it came to my mind that it was the same case.
'It was shocking and stressful because I thought, at the time when I was in Shrewsbury, I thought that Aurman had some serious injuries but when I got the news that he had died, it was shocking.
'It was terrible news.'
The court heard how Harwinder boarded a flight to Delhi, India, on August 22 and has since disappeared. Harpreet is said to have withdrawn cash from various cashpoints before the trail to catch him likewise went cold.
Sehajpal and Mehakdeep, meanwhile, lay low for a couple of weeks before booking flights to Austria, where they were both arrested last May.
Footage released by West Mercia Police shows the moment they were caught during a sting by armed cops in the Austrian village of Hohenzell, about 44 miles north-east of Salzburg and 146 miles west of the capital of Vienna.
The pair denied Aurman's murder but were found guilty by a jury on Tuesday. Their convictions follow that of Arshdeep Singh, Jagdeep Singh, Shivdeep Singh, and Manjot Singh, who were each jailed for 28 years for murder in April 2024.
Their inside man, Sukhmandeep Singh, was convicted of manslaughter and jailed for 10 years.