A grandmother and her son were jailed for life yesterday for ordering the murder of his wife, who they claimed had disgraced their traditional Sikh family by having an affair.

Surjit Athwal, 27, was lured to India where it is thought she was strangled and thrown into a river nine years ago. Her body has never been found.

Judge Giles Forrester sentenced Sukhdave Athwal, 43, and his mother Bachan Athwal, 70, to life imprison-ment for the “heinous crime” of plotting her murder.

Mrs Athwal, a grandmother of 16, wept in the dock as she was ordered to spend a minimum of 20 years in jail. Her son was told that he must serve at least 27 years behind bars. The pair were convicted of murder earlier this year after family members, who had initially been threatened against speaking out, came forward to police.

The court heard that Surjit, a mother of two, “disappeared off the face of the earth” after going to India with her mother-in-law to attend a family wedding in December 1998.

The Customs officer had been having an affair with a colleague at Heathrow, and had been planning to end her unhappy, ten-year arranged marriage.

When she failed to return to England, the killers, from Hayes, West London, told worried relatives and the police that she was a “slag” who had run away with another man. It is believed that she was strangled while in the Punjab and her body was thrown into the River Ravi.

Before sentence was passed yesterday, Kalyani Kaul, for Bachan, said that the grandmother, who suffered a small stroke during the trial, may die in jail.

Jonathan Rose, for Sukhdave, a Heathrow bus driver, said he was a good father to his children.

But Judge Forrester said: “You can hardly be a good father if you have killed their mother. This was a heinous crime characterised by great wickedness. The crime was premeditated and there was a significant degree of planning.”

In a victim impact statement read in court yesterday, Surjit’s brother Jagdeesh Singh described how the disappearance had left her family “stricken with anxiety”, made worse by the fact that her body was never found.

“The Athwals had managed to murder my sister and it appeared that with their manipulation and planning, they were going to get away with it. Surjit’s murderers were going about their lives as if nothing had happened,” he said.

Mr Singh said that in reaching justice, his family had battled with the “incompetence and disinterest” of the Indian police, Foreign Office apathy and a slow initial response from the Metropolitan police.

After the hearing at the Old Bailey, Surjit’s family and Asian women’s campaigners delivered a letter to Gordon Brown attacking the “double standards” of intervening when white Britons such as Madeleine McCann go missing, but failing to take action after Surjit’s disappearance.

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