A fourth Indian national was charged on Saturday by Canadian police in the investigation into the 2023 assassination of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar which plunged the country into a serious diplomatic crisis with India.
Already detained near Toronto for firearms-related offenses unrelated to the case, Amandeep Singh, 22, was charged with “first degree murder” (assassination, Editor’s note) and “criminal conspiracy in with a view to committing murder” in this case, the police indicated in a press release.
Police said the accused had resided in Ontario, but also in British Columbia, where Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead in June 2023 in the parking lot of the temple he led in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver.
An activist for the creation of a Sikh state under the name of Khalistan, he was wanted by the Indian authorities for alleged acts of “terrorism” and “conspiracy to commit murder”.
Accusations denied by the 45-year-old man, who arrived in Canada in 1997 and became a Canadian citizen in 2015, according to the World Organization of Sikhs of Canada.
Three other Indian nationals were arrested in early May in this case which plunged Ottawa and New Delhi into a serious diplomatic crisis in the fall after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly incriminated the Indian intelligence services.
New Delhi immediately described these accusations as “absurd”, adding last week that Canada was showing “political obsession” by accusing India.
For its part, the American justice system announced in November that it would prosecute an Indian national accused of having sponsored, at the instigation of a New Delhi agent, a plan to assassinate another Sikh leader, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, lawyer founder of the American organization Sikhs For Justice.