Woman murdered at office told friend of marriage woes

A friend and confidant of a woman stabbed to death at the office of a Surrey newspaper Thursday says 24-year-old Ravinder Kaur Bhangu was a “smiling” girl whose face never betrayed her serious marriage troubles.

Bhangu was stabbed to death at bilingual Punjabi-English weekly newspaper Sach Di Awaaz, where she worked, just before 11 a.m. on Thursday.

Her husband of two years, Manmeet Singh, 26, was arrested and charged with her first-degree murder. A friend says she had been planning to return to India in September following the breakdown of her marriage.

“I knew they had regular marital problems,” says Manna Virdi, who was on the Shan-E-Punjab Arts Club dance team with Bhangu.

“We used to talk all the time about, you know, every day stuff… ‘he didn’t do that, he didn’t do that’ – but nothing about violence or anything like that, nothing to the point where I thought he would do this.”

Bhangu left her husband at the end of April and had been living rent-free with a distant relative, according to Virdi.

Harjinder Thind with the Indo-Canadian radio station Red-FM told News1130 Singh was “very upset”and suspected his wife of infidelity.

Virdi says she had no other family here and was worried about money, so Bhangu began stitching Indian clothes for anyone who would hire her.

Her Shan-E-Punjab dance teammates are devastated by the murder.

“She’s a very simple, down-to-earth girl. She’d walk to practice, walk back,” Virdi tells News1130. “She didn’t have a car so she didn’t ask us for a ride, just to live life the simple way.

“…Lately she didn’t look as happy, but she was still OK, like she never showed it on her face that there was something this serious going on.”

“Even when she moved out of the house, like, we knew immediately that she had moved out but she didn’t say why, she just said they weren’t getting along.”

Singh is being held in custody and is scheduled to make his next appearance on Aug. 5.