LONDON: Four Sikhs convicted of the revenge stabbing in London of an Indian general who had led a raid on Sikhism’s holiest shrine in India were jailed in Britain on Tuesday, police said.

Retired Lieutenant General Kuldeep Singh Brar, 78, was attacked by a gang and slashed in the neck as he was walking with his wife near the busy Oxford Street shopping area during a holiday in Britain in September last year.

He was treated in hospital and discharged the next day.

Brar had spearheaded Operation Blue Star, a military raid against Sikh separatists in the Golden Temple at Amritsar in 1984 in which 1,000 people are estimated to have died.

Later that year, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards, triggering a further wave of retaliation in which nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed.

Mandeep Singh Sandhu, 35, from Birmingham in the English Midlands, was sentenced to 14 years in prison, London’s Metropolitan Police Service said in a statement.

Dilbag Singh, 37, of no fixed address, was also sentenced to 14 years while a woman, Harjit Kaur, 39, from Hayes, west of London, was sentenced to 11 years.They had been found guilty at Southwark Crown Court in July of wounding Brar with intent to do him grievous bodily harm.—Reuters