The president of a Sikh gurdwara charged with conspiracy to murder and terrorism in India has been shot and killed outside his temple in Surrey, British Columbia.
The general secretary of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara Society said Hardeep Singh Nijjar was alone in his van when he was attacked on Sunday evening as he left the parking lot of the place of worship.
Surrey RCMP said in a news release that the attack happened around 8.30pm and the victim died at the scene.
Authorities said they were looking for suspects and were trying to confirm the motive for the homicide.
There was a heavy police presence outside the temple on Monday, including an RCMP mobile command vehicle. A steady stream of members of the Sikh community arrived at the temple, but they refused to speak to reporters.
Police had set up a perimeter in part of Guru Nanak Way, a private road leading to the parking lot. Several members of the community tried to approach the scene, but were turned away by the police.
A video circulating on social media shows a person slumped in the driver’s seat of a gray van, the windows smashed. Another video of the same scene from a different angle shows the vehicle surrounded by police cars.
Another video posted on Twitter about 90 minutes after the attack showed a large crowd gathered outside the gurdwara, the scene lit by the flashing lights of police cars.
Some in the crowd chanted in Punjabi “Long live Khalistan”, “We want a separate Khalistan” and “Death to India”, as RCMP officers looked on.
Activism
Bhupinder Singh Hothi said Mr Nijjar had received death threats because of his support for a separate Sikh state in Khalistan, India, but the shooting will not deter those who share his beliefs.
Mr. Hothi said he did not know why Mr. Nijjar had been shot, but that he had already been threatened for his defense of Khalistan. “He was raising his voice for his country,” he said.
In India, Mr. Nijjar was charged with terrorism-related and insurrection offences.
India’s national investigative agency had issued an indictment last year accusing Mr Nijjar of conspiring to assassinate Hindu priest Kamaldeep Sharma, who the agency said was killed by a “terrorist gang”. in a village in Jalandhar, Punjab.
In a video posted by the gurdwara on its Facebook page, an unidentified man said in Punjabi that Mr Nijjar had been “martyred”.
“Mr. Nijjar has been silenced, but his voice will live forever. We will become his voice,” the man said.
The World Sikh Organization of Canada, a non-profit organization that claims to represent the interests of Canadian Sikhs, issued a press release on Monday calling the killing an “assassination.”
The organization maintained that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the police “were aware of the threat to Mr. Nijjar as well as other Sikh activists in Canada”.
“The fact that he was murdered in this way is a failure of these bodies to provide protection to someone they knew would be targeted,” the organization’s chairman, Tejinder Singh Sidhu, said in a statement. the press release.
“The role of India’s foreign interference must be thoroughly investigated and those responsible for this crime must be brought to justice,” he added.
The press release says Mr. Nijjar denied being involved in any criminal activity.