Man jailed after murdering wife who sought divorce

A murderer who strangled and stabbed his wife after she started divorce proceedings has been jailed for life.

Harminder Mattu attacked Paramjit Kaur at their home on Swan Crescent, Oldbury, on 30 March 2025.

At Wolverhampton Crown Court on Thursday, Judge John Butterfield KC handed Mattu a minimum prison term of 18 years.

The judge told the 51-year-old defendant that previous incidents of violence and coercion were aggravating factors in the case.

Mattu had tried to claim Kaur, 46, was drunk during the events of March last year, and that she had hit him, telling West Midlands Police in interview she was the one who had initially been armed with a knife.

He managed to take it off her but she was stabbed in the exchange, he claimed.

Mattu denied murder but following trial last month, a jury rejected his version of events and found he had intended to kill his wife.

A postmortem examination showed Kaur died as a result of pressure on her neck rather than her stab injuries, which most likely occurred after she was unconscious, police said.

Passing sentence, the judge told Mattu: "Many seconds of strangulation are not sensibly consistent with anything less than an intention to kill."

Kaur was in the process of leaving Mattu, having filed for divorce about two months earlier, citing the irretrievable breakdown of their marriage of 10 years.

The court heard how the murderer had previously slapped Kaur across the face, twisted her leg and broken her phone while drunk in December 2024, but she had not wanted to pursue criminal charges.

Another incident, which went unreported at the time but later shared with others, saw Mattu grab his wife by the throat, causing her to briefly lose consciousness, police stated.

At the end of 2024, she had briefly moved from the marital home but temporarily returned after Mattu expressed suicidal feelings.

In a victim impact statement read to the court prior to sentencing, her brother said the 46-year-old was very hard-working, kind and charitable and was someone who was "always there when we as a family needed her".

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