It’s been a full week since federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment that lays out an aborted murder-for-hire plot hatched in India last spring, and there’s still nothing to warrant claims by the federal government and its friends that the news is a vindication of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s melodramatic detonation of Indo-Canadian relations in September.
A recently unsealed U.S. criminal indictment alleging a plot connected to the Indian government to carry out multiple assassinations in North America has rattled Canadian and American relations with the world’s most populous democracy.
The court document, made public Wednesday, lays out U.S. prosecutors’ case against Indian national Nikhil Gupta. U.S. authorities allege Gupta was planning to kill an American Sikh political activist before he was arrested.
The indictment landed months after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shocked the House of Commons by accusing India of being behind the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia.
A newly unsealed U.S. criminal indictment has unleashed an unprecedented flood of details about an alleged plot connected to the Indian government to carry out multiple assassinations in North America.
Perhaps the most surprising allegation in the murder-for-hire indictment filed in New York state against Indian national Nikhil Gupta is a claim that there were plans to carry out three such killings on Canadian soil.
The indictment, made public Wednesday, accuses Gupta of attempting this year to arrange one killing in New York after receiving instructions from an Indian government employee.
Thank Justin for turning us into a province of Khalistan.
U.S. authorities thwarted a conspiracy to assassinate a Sikh separatist on American soil and issued a warning to India’s government over concerns it was involved in the plot, according to multiple people familiar with the case.
The target of the plot was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American and Canadian citizen who is general counsel for Sikhs for Justice, a U.S.-based group that is part of a movement pushing for an independent Sikh state called “Khalistan”.
The Canadian government and law enforcement agencies are remaining tight-lipped about a video circulating online telling travellers not to fly Air India after Nov. 19.
The video was posted by Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an advocate for an independent Sikh state known as Khalistan.
Pannun, who lives in Washington, D.C., is listed as a terrorist in India due to his views.
Canada’s rift with India continues. It’s been almost two months since Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau accused ‘agents of the government of India’ of assassinating Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Nijjar. The two countries have been in a diplomatic stand-off ever since, with trade talks suspended and Ottawa failing to provide any concrete proof behind its claim that Nijjar was killed under direction from Modi. But the possibility that Nijjar’s death was a result of gang activity between warring factions of criminal Sikh gang members in Canada has put a spotlight on the country’s growing Punjabi community and highlighted questions over Canada’s international student visa and immigration fraud.
India’s High Commissioner to Canada is urging Ottawa to release evidence backing up its accusation that agents of the Indian government were behind the killing of a prominent British Columbia Sikh separatist leader, a charge that ruptured bilateral relations after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced it in September.
In an interview on Friday, the commissioner, Sanjay Kumar Verma, told The Globe and Mail that India has not been shown concrete evidence by Canada or Canada’s allies that Indian agents were involved in the June gangland-style slaying of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, which took place in Burnaby, B.C.
SURREY, B.C. – Thousands of Sikh voters are expected to turn out today in the Metro Vancouver municipality of Surrey, to vote in an unofficial referendum at the centre of Canada’s ongoing tensions with India.
Organizers say the referendum on Khalistan — an independent state in India proposed by some Sikhs — is taking place at the same Surrey gurdwara where activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead in June.
Today’s vote is the second round of the referendum in British Columbia, after organizers said the first ballot on Sept. 10 was so popular that voting couldn’t be completed in one day.
SURREY, B.C. — Canada’s allegations about India’s links to the killing of activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar have significantly bolstered vocal support for the movement calling for an independent Sikh state, said organizers of an upcoming referendum.
The leader of the Conservative Party in Canada and Justin Trudeau’s main opponent in the upcoming elections, Pierre Poilievre, has criticised the Canadian prime minister’s handling of the diplomatic row with Delhi once again and said he has reduced himself to a “laughing stock” in India.
“Justin Trudeau is considered a laughing stock in India – the world’s biggest democracy,” Mr Poilievre said in an interview with Nepal’s Namaste Radio Toronto.
All but 21 Canadian diplomats in India have been pulled out of that country, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said Thursday, confirming the slashing of diplomatic staff by roughly two-thirds amid ongoing tensions between the two countries.
Joly said India has formally conveyed its plan to Ottawa to strip diplomatic immunity from 41 Canadian diplomats and their 42 family members by Friday.
Canada has facilitated the safe departure of those diplomats and their families from India, she added, noting the stripping of immunity “would put their personal safety at risk.”
Two months after the Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot and killed in a parking lot in suburban Vancouver, Canadian police showed up at the house of a close friend with warning: his life was also in danger.
Two officers – one of them from the federal national security team – handed Gurmeet Singh Toor a document known as a “duty to warn” paper. It required him to confirm that they had told him his life “might be in peril” – and to acknowledge that any attempt on his life might put his family at risk.
“I asked them who might be threatening me and why my life was at risk,” Toor told the Guardian. “They said they couldn’t explain the threats because of ‘security reasons’. But they told me they had information that I was in danger.”
In the aftermath of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assertion that “agents” of the Indian government were involved in the shooting death of a Sikh leader in British Columbia, my colleagues Norimitsu Onishi and Vjosa Isai looked into growing tensions within the Indian diaspora in Canada, ones that reflect divisions in India that have been fueled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism.
The Liberal and NDP coalition have failed to protect Canada’s borders. The military has been neglected: there are only 300 full-time military personnel in Canada’s vast North, and the government is looking to further reduce the defence budget. But the gaping holes in the immigration system constitutes another security concern, and underlies the recent diplomatic spat with India.
The family of a Sikh activist who died after Indian authorities accused him of pulling down the national flag during a protest in London have called on the chief coroner to investigate his death.
Avtar Singh Khanda, 35, who campaigned for a separate Sikh state, was admitted to Birmingham City Hospital with a sudden illness in June this year. He died just days after, having been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and a blood clot in his lungs.
