Beneath the diplomacy of tablecloths appears the language of weapons. The government of India, whose Prime Minister Narendra Modi was received with full honors at the White House last June, tried to assassinate a prominent Sikh separatist leader, who is a US citizen, in New York after calling for the creation of a state. sovereign. This was reported this Wednesday by the Department of Justice.
The indictment on the failed assassination attempt reveals the two charges against the man of Indian nationality who was commissioned to hire a hitman to end the life of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. The Modi government considers him a terrorist. The plan, according to federal prosecutors, was hatched by an unnamed Indian intelligence agent, referred to as CC-1, who was also linked to the assassination in Canada of a Sikh separatist leader.
This issue complicates relations between India and the United States despite official praise. Biden asked Modi for explanations at the G20 meeting last September in New Delhi. Around the same time, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also raised the issue when he met with his Indian counterpart in Washington, around the time of the UN General Assembly.
Nikhil Gupta, 52, was arrested in the Czech Republic on June 30 on charges of hiring a hitman, the Southern District of New York prosecutor's office said. The two countries have an extradition treaty, although it was not clear when the detainee would be transferred to the United States.
Still according to this version, Gupta is accused of looking for a gunman to kill the separatist leader. The Indian intelligence officer told him there would be another target in California. “We have many in our sights,” he assured her.
The indictment also includes a photo of a roll of $100 bills that would have been paid as an advance for the work. The final price was $100,000. Gupta thought that he was contacting an international drug trafficker who would help him recruit the hitman to do the job. It turned out, however, that this person was a source of information for the US government, indicated the DEA, the federal agency against drug trafficking.
As soon as this case became known, the matter reverberated through government channels. The assassination in Canada last June of the Sikh leader Hardeep Sing Nijjar, whose responsibility Prime Minister Justin Trudeadu attributed to the Indian government, already represented interference in Biden's foreign policy agenda.
Despite the fact that the US secret services endorsed Trudeau's thesis and the growing concern about the evolution of democracy in India, the US president has continued to court Modi as a counterpower to the influences of China and Russia, and there have been agreements on defense and trade.
But the arguments that the Indian government pulled strings to kill some of its critics in Canada and do the same in the United States are something that undermines any notion of reliability as an ally of that country.
“The dedication of law enforcement and prosecutors thwarted and exposed a plot to murder a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil,” prosecutor Matthew G. Olsen said in a statement. “At the Department of Justice, we will relentlessly use all of our authority to demand accountability for deadly foreign conspiracies,” he added.
The Indian spy not identified in the documentation contacted Gupta in May to arrange the assassination, according to the indictment. That employee promised Gupta that this would help get charges dropped for a pending court charge in India.
Once Gupta contacted a person, who was actually collaborating with the DEA, an undercover agent posed as the gunman. The Indian official provided Gupta with information about the victim, including telephone numbers, his address in New York and his daily routine.
“Gupta ordered the gunman to carry out the job as soon as possible, but also specially instructed him not to commit the murder around the high-level visit,” referring to the Indian president's trip to Washington, according to the documentation.
Like his friend Nijjar, murdered in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun “is an eloquent critic of the government of India,” the prosecution stressed, and leads an organization in the United States that calls for the secession of Punjab, territory where there is an extensive population of Sikhs. The official who recruited Gupta told him that Nijjar's death was on order.
“The victim (Pannun) publicly called for the secession of Punjab and the establishment of a sovereign Sikh state called Khalistan and the government had banned the victim's organization in India,” the prosecution said.
The White House learned of these events in early July. “As soon as we learned, we took this information very seriously and held direct conversations with the government of India at the highest level to raise our concerns,” the National Security Council of the Biden administration said in a statement.
Jack Sullivan himself, national security advisor, required India to investigate the matter and go to the end, in addition to asking for guarantees that a situation like this will not be repeated. And he stressed that this could permanently damage trust between the two countries. Biden has asked the director of the CIA to travel to that country and tell his counterpart that the United States will not tolerate these activities and that he will hold India accountable.
