UK court finds Pakistani guilty of killing Tamil restaurant manager

LONDON: A Pakistan-born man, Shazeb Khalid, has been found guilty of murdering Vignesh Pattabiraman, a 36-year-old Tamil who worked as a restaurant manager in Reading, UK on Valentines Day this year.

The jury at Reading crown court on Wednesday found Khalid, 25, guilty of the murder of Pattabiraman by deliberately running his car into him for a ‘contract fee’ of £2,000. Pattabiraman died at Royal Berkshire Hospital early on February 15. A postmortem examination found he died of head injury.

Pattabiraman, who hailed from IOB Colony near Marudamalai in Coimbatore, moved to the UK with his wife, Ramya, in December 2022. After quitting his job at south Indian restaurant Vel, he was due to start a job at Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill two days later, but was mown down by a stolen red Range Rover.

The crown case was that Vel restaurant's operation manager Mohammed Sadiq Ishmail, an Indian national, had asked Soiheem Hussain, his friend, to find someone to threaten Pattabiraman, who he believed was snitching on the restaurant for employing illegal staff. Hussain recruited Khalid who ran the car into Pattabiraman, then got out and bludgeoned him to death. A neighbour described seeing a person get out of the crashed vehicle and strike something three times.

The prosecution said Khalid stole money from the victim’s rucksack. Vel in Brighton was fined £20,000 for employing two illegal workers following an immigration raid in December 2022. In August 2023 there was a raid on Vel Reading but no action was taken.

Khalid, who moved to the UK from Pakistan in 2007 said he had accidentally driven his car into Pattabiraman. He claimed he had only intended to “scare him” and “maybe grab him and tell him to stop snitching” after being offered £2,000 for the job by Hussain. He denied assaulting him or stealing money.

Hussain, 27, denied hiring Khalid to cause serious harm to Raman. He was found not guilty of murder, but guilty of assisting an offender. Khalid and Hussain will be sentenced on October 10. Mya Reilly who is pregnant with Khalid’s child was found not guilty of perverting the course of justice and of assisting an offender.