Front Burner - Is India hiring gangs to kill political enemies in Canada?

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

In June of 2023, Sikh activist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar was gunned down outside a gurdwara in Surrey, B.C., after evening prayers. Three men have now been arrested and charged with his murder, and all three are affiliated with a gang with ties to Punjab. But sources close to the investigation believe these men were just hired guns, acting on orders from the top levels of the Indian government's intelligence service.CBC senior reporter Evan Dyer breaks down his exclusive reporting on this story and the increasingly blurring lines between organized crime and Indian foreign policy.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. It was nearly a year ago now that Sikh activist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nidjar was shot dead outside a gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. It happened in really brazen fashion.

Surveillance video shows this white sedan rolling up on his pickup truck as he's leaving the parking lot after evening prayers. Two gunmen jump out and rush his vehicle and start shooting. The murder of Mr. Niger at the Scott Road Gurdwara was outrageous and it was reprehensible. Those scars will remain in our community for some time. It wasn't too long after the killing that the Prime Minister said this. Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil

is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty. It was an accusation that caused a major cooling of diplomatic relations between Canada and India. My colleague Evan Dyer broke the news last week that three men have been arrested and charged in connection with Nidger's murder. And they may be connected to other murders in other parts of Canada. Police have said very little on the record about the connection to the Indian government, other than to say that aspect of the investigation is ongoing. But Evans' reporting has looked at how Nidger's murder is being seen by intelligence sources

as another example of this growing trend of India doing its dirty work through local organized crime. Evans is here with me now. We're going to talk about the latest developments, but also notably how high up the chain, read how close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi this potentially goes. Evan, hey, thank you so much for coming on. Hi, Jamie.

So this was obviously a huge story when Hardeep Singh Nidra was shot and killed last June. And as I mentioned, he was a Canadian citizen living in Surrey. For those who might not know, can you just briefly remind us why he would have potentially been a target for the Indian government? Well, the Indian government would argue that he was a terrorist. That was the term that they would use to describe him. They accused him of being a member of a group they call the Khalistan Tiger Force. In 2014, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued an arrest warrant for Nidra, calling him the mastermind of the Khalistan Tiger Force,

which the Indian government considers a terrorist group. He was never extradited or convicted of any crimes. Some of the allegations were deemed unsubstantiated. But I think that the thing that really had aggravated the Indian government was a series of referendums organized by a group of which he was a member called Six for Justice. And these were non-binding referenda held around the world in various parts of the Sikh diaspora in the UK and Canada that we've seen some voting in Surrey and Brampton. Thousands gathered in Surrey on Sunday to cast their vote in a referendum

asking for an independent homeland for Sikhs in India called Khalistan. Organizers say that turnout was so strong in September that voting could not be finished in one day. And basically a lot of Sikhs come out and it tends to be the people who want a separate Sikh state that do come out to these referendums. I'm here to support Khalistan. I think that Khalistan should be a thing and I support it because that's the only way people of Punjab can enjoy freedom, religious freedom, human equality. It has no actual effect on India, but it annoys India and particularly the Modi government a great deal. And Hardeep Singh Nidger was a sort of a Canadian deputy or adjutant to

the main organizer of this worldwide referendum effort, who's based in the U.S., who's a joint U.S.-Canadian citizen called Gurpatwant Singh Panu, and he also was a target for assassination. It was a plot that was foiled by the U.S. government. It's alleged an unnamed Indian government employee recruited an Indian national named Nikhil Gupta to orchestrate an assassination in New York City. But Gupta tipped off authorities when he unknowingly asked

a police informant for assistance and was put in contact with an undercover agent posing as a hitman. He allegedly told them, we have to finish four jobs, the U.S. murder, and after that, three in Canada. So there's evidence that India has gone after other people involved in that exact same referendum effort. Right. And I want to talk to you more about that case in the U.S. in a little bit. But first, who are the three men who have now been arrested for Nijer's murder? What were you able to find out about them? Well, they're all young men in their 20s. Their names are Karan Brar, Karanpreet Singh, and Kamalpreet Singh. They're from Punjab or Haryana states in northern India. The organization that investigators have told me that they belong to

is called the Lawrence Bishnoi Gang. And this is basically a Punjabi-based extortion ring, or at least it began that way. It's a gang that really grew out of student politics in Punjab and spread into the extortion of things like liquor merchants and mines, and also got into drug trafficking and also offers guns for hire. And so these three sort of fit into that last category, according to investigators who see them as very dangerous people. I should say that I spoke with one investigator who's had a long experience with BC gangs and who described these three as some of the most dangerous people that he's ever dealt with. And there are possible connections to two other shootings in Edmonton and Winnipeg, right? That's right. Investigators are looking into three murders in addition to the Niger killing that happened after the Niger killing, because one of those homicides, the one in Edmonton, was a double homicide.

First of all, we saw just two days after Prime Minister Trudeau rose in the House of Commons and accused India, basically, in the Niger killing, there was another killing in Winnipeg, which was not initially connected to the same group. It was a person who has a lot of gang ties, unlike Nijer, because Nijer is really a political figure. He's not being accused of being involved in the world of organized crime. Sukhdul Singh Gill, who was killed in Winnipeg on September 20th, was involved in that world. Some people may have been familiar with Gill, who went by the alias Sukha Dineke, because his name was in the media in India. He was allegedly part of the Bambia gang. Gill was accused of arranging money for gang members in India to buy weapons and extortion.

But he was also seen as a Khalistani or a Sikh separatist by the government of India. And they had actually published his name in a list published by the National Investigation Agency of India just the day before he died as a wanted terrorist. And they accused him of being part of the Khalistan Tiger Force, that same group that they accused Nijra of being part of. Six weeks after that, another person connected to Punjabi organized crime called Harpreet Appal was killed in Edmonton. And that was a double homicide because he was in his car unfortunately with two children one of them was his own son 11 years old and another boy who was a friend of his son. Edmonton police have released surveillance footage of two suspects wanted in the killing of a father and his 11 year old son. The shooting happened last Thursday outside a gas station on 50th Street and Ellerslie

Road. And police say that killing was not a case of a stray round. That was deliberate. Right. The killing of the child was deliberate. Yeah. You mentioned before the Bishnoi gang. And just can you tell me more about the leadership of that gang? I know the founder is in prison, right, in India. fairly recently. Then they moved him to a maximum security prison in Gujarat. He's been able throughout his imprisonment to communicate with people on the outside of prison, not only his own gang, which he appears to be able to coordinate quite effectively from behind bars, but he's also given television interviews. He makes statements on social media. He's been able to continue to operate, it appears, as the leader of this gang. He began in student politics in the city of Chandigarh, which is the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, and spread into organized crime, along with a fellow student called Goldie Brar, who is believed to be in California. And these people are really the sort of the leaders of that gang that has got something like 700 hit men working for it, gun men working for it,

mostly in northern India, collecting extortion. And the three arrests that we're talking about in Canada, I know police haven't said very much about it so far, but what have you been able to find out in your own reporting about where the orders might have come from? Well, the three homicides that we're talking about may have differences between them in the sense that the one where police are most convinced, and I should say not only police, but government sources that I've spoken to as well, that the Indian government gave the order is the killing of Harjeet Singh Nidger. That does not appear to respond to any kind of a gang war or vendetta or anything between, say, six separatist groups. On the contrary, there's a large body of evidence, and it includes signals, intelligence, intercepts that show that this killing was ordered by the Indian government. And it was not rogue officials either, according to

investigators. You know that India has claimed that rogue officials were behind the US assassination plot, which we discussed a little while ago. But there's no credibility given to that among Canadian investigators. They say far too many people in the Indian government were involved, and it goes to the highest levels. Right. In the case of the other two murders, however, I mean, it's possible that these, because they're using, allegedly using gang hitmen, the gang also has its own business and it has its own enemies. And so those killings, they're less sure they were ordered by the Indian government. It may be that these people are mixing gang business with government of India business. And Sukhdhar Singh Gill, although, as I mentioned, the Indian government had listed him just the day before, and therefore there were political reasons for his assassination.

There were also gang motives that have nothing to do with politics, because he was an enemy of the Bishnoi gang. They accused him of killing a couple of their allies. So it's harder to nail down the motive in those other two murders. This idea that there's this overlap between politics and organized crime here. between politics and organized crime here. Talk to me a little bit more about that. Well, in Punjab itself, going back many years, there has been a tendency for crime and politics to mix to some extent. You know, you have some powerful criminal organizations in the state. There's a liquor mafia that is connected to the political world. There's also drug trafficking. Punjab has a major drug addiction crisis. It began with Afghan heroin. It's now spread to pills. And of course, that always, as everywhere in the world, wherever

there's a big illicit drug problem, you have a lot of money associated with that, which drives organized crime. And this crossover has always existed. And you've also seen traditionally in Punjab, the use of assassins, of hired guns, hitmen to get rid of business and political rivals. So it's a connection that's existed for a long time in local Punjabi politics, including student politics. That may sound surprising to people here, but it's not unusual in Punjab for student politics to involve assassination. Is it fair for me to say that if you are, you know, the Indian government, theoretically, by going through like a criminal gang to, you know, do your dirty work, it gives you

maybe another level of plausible deniability. Yeah, certainly. I think we saw that already because on the weekend right after these arrests, the day after these arrests, Josh Anker, the Indian foreign minister, was able to come out and say, well, what does this have to do with us? This is gangsters killing gangsters. And therefore, it's Canada's fault for having lax immigration policies and allowing these people in and he even was able to to sort of posture and do a bit of I told you so and he said we've been warning Canada for years about allowing these kinds of people into their country and these are the consequences of them doing it. A number of people with organized crime

links from Punjab have been made welcome in Canada. We have been telling Canada, saying, look, these are wanted criminals from India. So why should we be afraid this has nothing to do with us? This is their problem over there. And so that is exactly the kind of plausible deniability that presumably India would have been looking for when it chose to go this route and not to expose Indian government agents. I mean, you can imagine if Friday's arrests, instead of being just Indian nationals, were members of some official Indian government body, then that would have looked very different. However, having said that, the Indian government has not covered its tracks very well because while the shooters are

indeed allegedly gang members, if you follow up the line, up the chain of command, you quite quickly do get into Indian officials. And just tell me a little bit more about that and about how high up, you know, you mentioned in the case of Nijer that it goes quite high up the chain. Like, what more do we know about that? And then, you know, I was reading the Washington Post reporting on that case in the U.S. that you were talking about, the hit on Panem, right, in New York. And they said that this was ordered, according to sources, by an officer in India's spy agency. And they also suggested that this officer in the spy agency probably had the green light from one of Modi's

closest allies, right? And so just, yeah, talk to me a little bit more about that. So if we look at that particular case, the Pernoon assassination, there are some unnamed co-conspirators in the unsealed indictment who are Indian officials, who've since been identified by the Washington Post as an agent of India's spy agency, which is called the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, called Yadav. And above him was the then head of the RAW, Samant Goel. And those two people have been identified as individuals who were caught up in the surveillance, the wiretap, or the intercepts around the plot to kill Panun. Goel has since left

the research and analysis wing. We understand he no longer heads it. And in the case of that plot, the Indian government, rather than pursuing just flat out, as they have with Canada and the Nijer case. I think the evidence in the unsealed indictment made it impossible to do that, and so therefore they claimed that it was a rogue operation after several months of stalling. India has called Canada's allegations absurd, but in stark contrast, isn't rejecting the U.S. claims. India's government says it takes the allegations seriously and it's already being examined by relevant departments. They had done an investigation and they found that their own operatives

had done this freelancing on their own initiative, not unlike the argument that Saudi Arabia used to distance itself from the killing of Adnan Khashoggi, where also we saw something like five officials take the fall and were at least nominally sentenced to imprisonment. Whether they're actually sitting in a prison cell, we would have to take Saudi Arabia's word for that. But that was sort of the deal that was able to settle that matter between the United States and Saudi Arabia, so that both could move on. And it appears that India is trying to make a sort of a similar arrangement, and that Goel and Yadav look like the fall guys in that arrangement. But I can tell you that from the time that I became aware of this, which is now about eight months ago, up till today, investigators have never changed their view of this matter, which is that this goes to the highest levels of the Indian government, that there's no way it's a rogue

operation, and that there's also no way that assassinations in G7 countries, particularly the United States, could ever be approved without going all the way to the top of the Indian government. And just to be clear, when we're talking about going all the way to the top of the Indian government. And just to be clear, when we're talking about going all the way to the top, we're talking about Modi. Well, we're certainly talking at the very least about India's national security advisor, Ajit Doval, who is sort of a number two to Modi throughout his governing career. You know, does that mean that Modi, Narendra Modi himself, was apprised of all the details of the names of the individuals who were on a hit list, for example, or how these hits were going to be carried out? I don't think anybody can say that with any confidence, but one only has to look at Modi's speeches on the campaign trail to see that he is publicly talking about going to other countries and killing India's enemies. You know, he said just recently in a campaign speech, India isn't going to send dossiers anymore.

This being a reference to India's previous attempts to get other countries to crack down for it. There was a time when dossiers were sent. Today's India sends doses, not dossiers, to the terrorists. Today's India goes into their homes and kills them. So, I mean, there's really no leg to stand on to believe that Narendra Modi would not be aware of, at the very least, aware of the general lines of what's happening. Yeah, just before I came into this interview,

somebody told me about that thing that he said about going into your homes and killing people. He said similar things in the last election campaign too. This is our principle. We will enter their house and kill them. And actually, last time that he said this, people generally assumed that he was referring to going after India's enemies in Pakistan.

They did not realize that it might be a reference to going after people in countries like the U.S., Canada, and maybe Britain. And yet, it appears that that is what he was referring to. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples,

I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. And just to clarify something you said earlier, you know, you said that there is evidence that in the NINJAR case, this also goes all the way to the top, right? And just do we know what that evidence is at this point specifically? And could we potentially, if we don't know, could we potentially be looking at the same chain of command being involved as was involved in the Pennan case, right, in the U.S.,

given that these two men were so closely connected, right? Well, there is certainly evidence in the U.S. indictment of some cross-communication between the people involved in the Canadian and the people involved in the U.S. plots. At one point, for example, the go-between between the Indian government and the hitman, who actually turned out to be a confidential informant, talks about one job in the US, which we assume refers to Pennan, and three jobs in Canada. Right after Nidger is killed, literally within a couple of hours, that same official has a video of Nidger's body in the front of his truck, dead, right after being shot, because they

apparently took images of him as a sort of a proof of death. And he sent those to the hitman, saying, you know, okay, the Canadian side are doing their job. What about you? Get a move on with your own murder plot. So clearly, the official who was dealing with Nick Gupta, the drug trafficker who was setting up this hit in the United States was very aware of what was going on in the Canadian case as well. And that's been pretty clearly established in the unsealed indictment. With regards to how high it goes or how much they can prove about how high it goes. I have to say that I don't know that anybody has communications at the level where it might be, for example, India's national security advisor talking to the Indian prime minister. I don't have any indication that that

kind of signals intelligence exists. I think that, and there's a little bit of speculation here, I must say, because I haven't seen that signals intelligence, but I think that part of what investigators are saying is that this goes so high, they can track it so high, and also it goes so wide that it makes use, for example, of official Indian government channels like embassies and consulates to communicate this plan and coordinate this plan, that there's no way that it could happen without being directed from the very top. And then there's also just the belief that in given the nature, and we actually, someone who said this just a couple of days ago was former CSIS director Dick Fadden. He pointed out something that I think is very true of the Indian public service generally, which is that this is not an organization where you score points for going off

on a tangent or doing your own thing. This is an extremely vertical, hierarchical government where people advance by following orders. And it would be highly unusual for anything like this to be done on a sort of a freelance basis. Yeah, I remember that this was kind of a similar analysis after the Khashoggi murder that you mentioned people people were talking about how like the rogue actor explanation just like didn't hold water in a place like Saudi Arabia uh Evan these details are absolutely wild um given everything that we've talked about today I do wonder before we go how are people in the Canadian Sikh diaspora feeling in terms of their own safety right now? Well, I think one person who I've spoken to about his own safety actually is Panen, who I think could probably be considered India's public enemy number one

in this entire conspiracy. He was probably their priority target. And he says he feels no fear. He says he's ready for whatever comes and takes a somewhat fatalistic view of all of this. I don't fear the death, the physical death I do not worry about, because the issue, the contentious issue, is not the threat to my life. This is the existential threat to the people of Punjab. But certainly there are others in the community who have had to go into hiding, who have had to spend time away from their families, because they take the threats very seriously. There will be some relief, I think, from these arrests, but no one in the community is under any illusion that these three alleged killers

would be the only sort of low-level triggermen that the Indian government could lay its hands on, or even the only members of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang who are active in Canada. No one would believe either of those things. So given the fact that this is still a large government with unlimited resources, that there's still a vast diaspora community here that includes all kinds of people, and given the fact that India doesn't seem to have been deterred also by the public revelation of what happened or the public accusation by Prime Minister Trudeau to India or by the U.S. indictment necessarily, since their activities, at least up to the point of the U.S. indictment, their activities were continuing. I think that there's good reason to think it could happen again. Evan, I want to thank you so much for this. I have been trying my best to keep up on this story, but you just pulled so many threads together for me. So we're really, really appreciative that you took the time. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.