Last November, when Manhattan prosecutors named an Indian citizen, Nikhil Gupta, in a foiled plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist leader in New York, they provided chilling new details on an unfolding sordid drama involving at least three countries—Canada, India, and the United States. The indictment revealed that Gupta, allegedly a drug trafficker, had been hired by an official inside the Indian government (unnamed co-conspirator, CC-1). CC-1 directed Gupta to hire an assassin to take out the New York–based lawyer who we now know—he has been identified by US officials in various media reports—was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a voluble supporter of carving a separate sovereign Sikh state of Khalistan out of India. The US officials had access to private text messages between CC-1 and Gupta which gave them full visibility into a larger plot to kill at least four Sikh separatist leaders in North America—a plot that first became public with the attack that did succeed: the killing of separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, BC, last June.
The fifteen-page Department of Justice document, unsealed in a New York district court, also provided new details on Nijjar’s fatal shooting. Just hours after the forty-five-year-old’s murder, CC-1 sent a video of the bloodied body, along with Pannun’s New York address, to Gupta. As per the indictment, two days later, CC-1 sent Gupta a news article about Pannun and told him Pannun’s killing was a “priority now.” (Nijjar, who organized referendums in Canada in support of Khalistan, was an associate of Pannun’s. The two had travelled together to Geneva to petition the United Nations to recognize the killings of Sikhs in India in 1984, in the aftermath of the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi, as a genocide.) Nijjar’s murder outside a Sikh temple in Surrey turned into a diplomatic spat in September, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed on the floor of Parliament there were “credible allegations” that the Indian government had been involved in the killing. The Canadian government asked an Indian intelligence official, Pavan Kumar Rai, officially accredited as a diplomat at the Indian high commission in Ottawa, to leave the country, leading to retaliatory actions against Canada by the Indian government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
