London, Nov. 4: A man has been charged with the murder of Pardeep Kaur, the 30-year-old Sikh woman whose body was discovered in waste ground underneath the Harlington High Street flyover in Hayes, west London, a week ago.
Vadims Ruskuls, 24, a Latvian national of "no fixed abode", appeared at Hendon Magistrates Court yesterday afternoon charged with Par deep's murder.
He was further charged with "preventing the lawful burial of the deceased".
He remains in custody, and was remanded to appear at the Old Bailey on Monday, November 7, which means his will be a full-fledged murder trial.
Pardeep was reported missing at approximately 8pm on Monday, October 17, after she did not return home from work. She had left at 6.10am when it was it was pitch black to walk to a hotel where she worked but later it became clear she did arrive at her destination. Her body was discovered at 4.30pm last Saturday by the police.
Some reports have suggested she was strangled, but police have said the post mortem has been inconclusive and further tests need to be done before the cause of death can be established.
What is odd about this case is that the man appears to have given himself up.
Police said earlier this week that "detectives investigating the murder of Pardeep Kaur in Hillingdon have arrested a man. A 24-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of Pardeep's murder after he walked into Slough Police Station at approximately 5pm on Monday, October 31".
He was kept in custody at a north London police station.
Now that a man has been charged for Pardeep's killing, there can be no further speculation about the case until the end of the trial. Under the EU's free movement of labour, nationals of Latvia, a member of the EU, can enter and work in the UK without any restrictions or even checks.
This will cease to be the case if Britain formally ends its membership of the EU.
There was a notorious case involving a Latvian national, Arnis Zalkalns, a 41-year-old builder, who was assumed to have killed a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Alice Goss. She was targeted and strangled in woods in west London in August 2014. The killer later took his own life just before he was due to be arrested and charged.
It transpired later that Zalkalns had served seven years for battering his wife to death in Latvia but came to the UK in 2007 without the authorities checking his record. It also emerged Zalkalns was accused of indecently assaulting a 14-year-old girl in 2009 near the same canal two miles from Alice's murder scene.
But no checks were carried out to see if he had a criminal record in his homeland because it was not Scotland Yard policy at the time.
He escaped prosecution as his first victim refused to make a statement.
There have been persistent worries about East Europeans criminals entering Britain.
Alice's distraught parents, Rosalind Hodgkiss and Jose Gross, and elder sister Nina released a statement demanding to know why Zalkalns was able to walk into Britain.
"Although we now have certain information about how Alice died, we are still left with a number of serious unanswered questions about what the authorities knew or should have known about the man believed to have killed our daughter when he came to the UK," Alice's family said.
"Alice believed in the free movement of people and so do we," the statement said. "For her sake we are determined to ask these questions responsibly and sensitively. It remains impossible to describe the pain of losing Alice. Her death has left a hole in our lives that can never be filled."
It needs to be stressed that under English law, the man charged with Pardeep's killing is considered innocent unless he is convicted in a court of law.
