Mundill Mahil: ‘What
happened to Gagan is
so horrifi c. It felt , if
I told my story, it would
seem as if I didn’t care’Mundill Mahil knows it sounds cheesy, but as a girl she wanted to
save the world. She was a model student. At Rochester grammar
school, she got 10 A*s at GCSE , three As at A-level, mentored an
autistic child and worked in a hospice , before winning a place
at Brighton and Sussex Medical School ; she hoped to do aid
work for Médecins Sans Frontières when she qualifi ed. Then
everything went wrong ; at 19 , she was charged with murder.
There are no winners in this story. One young man died;
one was convicted of murder, another of manslaughter. On 25
February 2011, 21-year-old Gagandip Singh was brutally beaten
by two men in Mahil’s Brighton bedroom, before being burned
to death in the boot of a Mercedes. A year later, an Old Bailey
jury acquitted Mahil of murder, but found her guilty of GBH with
intent, for having lured Singh to his death. She was given a
six-year sentence. Her motive, prosecutors argued, was revenge;
she had told friends Singh had assaulted her six months earlier.
It was a shocking crime. In a television documentary
broadcast last year , Singh’s mother, Tejinder , talked about
how she has struggled since her son was killed: “I have no life
left. Two or three times a day, I think I want to die.” Last week,
Singh’s sister, Amandip, told the Guardian that the family still
grieve every day. “We will never be a normal family again.
There’s not a moment we do not think of Gagandip.”
Mahil, now 29, has never talked about what happened before :
she never felt she had the right. “ It is so horrifi c, what happened
to Gagan. It felt , if I told my story, it would seem as if I didn’t
care : ‘Look at me, I’m the victim.’ ” We are talking over Zoom,
Mahil from her home in Kent, and she is clearly nervous.
In media coverage of the case, Mahil has been portrayed as
a vengeful student at the heart of a honeytrap plot to kill
Singh, once her close friend. And she admits she was her own
worst enemy in the days that followed: it was true she had
invited him to her house under false pretences ; and that when his
body was found, she failed to tell police the full story. She even
acknowledges that Singh would not have died had he not come
JULIAN ANDERSON/THE GUARDIANto see her. Looking back, Mahil says she is not surprised the →