CHB dairy owner who killed wife flees to India

A Waipukurau dairy owner who admitted killing his wife in 2004, but was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity has fled to India, TV ONE News has reported.
Less than a month before convicted murderer Phillip Smith escaped, Chander Singh Rathod, who was detained under the Mental Health Act and was still under psychiatric care, fled to India last October.
TV One News reported that the High Commission of India issued a new passport to Rathod in December 2009 in accordance with India's passport rules and India's High Commissioner says there was no advice by New Zealand authorities that he should not leave New Zealand.
An Official Information Act request by the broadcaster revealed that after his trial he was given a 'special patient' status and spent time in hospital. After a long period of rehabilitation he was living in the community.
While under Ministry of Health care, however, he fled New Zealand on an Indian passport to his country of birth.
"In this case there was no indication that this man would breach his leave conditions," acting Chief Medical Officer, Dr John Crawshaw told TV One News.
The Ministry of Health confirmed that it was notified five days after Rathod had left the country and then informed police and immigration.
Customs say no alert was placed on its computer system to flag that this individual should not leave.
But responsibility was claimed by the Ministry of Health today. "Ultimately as the Director of Mental Health the buck stops with me," said Dr Crawshaw.
Rathod bashed his wife to death with a softball bat in their Waipukurau home during a paranoid delusion that she was having an extra-marital affair, but was found not guilty of murder on the grounds of insanity.
The verdict in the trial came more than seven hours after the jury of eight women and four men started deliberating on the fourth day of the man's third trial, resulting from the beating at the Sunset Dairy on the morning of March 20 last year.
The first trial in October last year had barely started when Rathod collapsed, and the hearing was abandoned after he was assessed as medically unfit to continue his defence of the charge of murdering his wife, Suguna Chilamakuru.
The second trial in June ended with a hung jury on a Saturday, after it been sequestered overnight in a bid to get a result, and a new trial was ordered.
Rathod pleaded not guilty, although he admitted beating his wife repeatedly with the bat, telling police later he started whacking her legs when she denied his accusations that she was having an affair, and that he went wild when she started naming names, and hit her several times in the head.
Police said they later found no evidence she had had any affair.
It was believed that if she had been naming or confirming people Rathod suspected, it was only to try to make him stop hitting her.
Experts believe he was suffering from paranoid delusion disorder, worsened by severe sleep deprivation as he worried about what his wife was doing in their house when he was asleep or while she was at work as a veterinarian at the Richmond Takapau meat plant.
The couple had come to New Zealand in mid-2000, six months after their marriage in India, and had two children who as part of their cultural upbringing had returned to India a short while before the attack.