A man visiting his newborn grandchild in Canada on a temporary visit was convicted of criminally harassing two teenage girls outside their school.
Jagjit Singh (51), who was given a short sentence, will now be deported and barred from re-entering Canada again. According to reports, Singh started frequenting the smoking area outside a local high school in the Sarnia area, where he allegedly sexually assaulted and harassed young Canadian girls.
He had requested a photo with two girls. They accepted, thinking he would leave the place after taking the photo.
However, after taking one photo sitting between two girls, he said that he wanted another photo. According to Times of India, he then put his arm around a girl who stood up and pushed his hands away. Singh, who does not speak English, also allegedly followed female students as they left school property.
Singh was arrested on September 16 and was charged with sexual interference and sexual assault.
On September 19, Singh pleaded not guilty to sexual interference but guilty to the lesser included offence of criminal harassment at a Sarnia courtroom.
“You had no business attending at the property of (that) high school,” Justice Krista Lynn Leszczynski said as quoted by Times of India. “This type of conduct will not be tolerated.”
Singh's lawyer told the judge that his experience in jail was shocking. He had a ticket to return to India on December 30, but the judge ordered his deportation and a ban for his entry in Canada.
One of the girls wrote that “part of what makes this so difficult is that the offender was someone who had come to Canada as a newcomer". “This betrayal has affected the way I see people of his culture and men who are older than me. I don’t even want to know what he was thinking or what he was doing with those pictures,” another girl wrote in her statement.
Singh also got a three-year probation order that bans him from talking to either girl or being where they live, work or go to school; from being around or talking to anyone under age 16, except his newborn grandchild. He is also banned from being within 100 metres of any pool, school, playground, park or community centre.
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