Thu 23 October 2023:
A plot to kill a Sikh separatist in the US was foiled by authorities, and they have warned India that they may have been linked with the administration in New Delhi, the Financial Times has reported.
The FT on Wednesday named Gurpatwant Singh Pannun as the intended victim of the allegedly failed plot, citing anonymous sources.
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The report said Pannun had declined to say whether US authorities had warned him about the plot, but quoted him as saying he would “let the US government respond to the issue of threats to my life on American soil from the Indian operatives”.
There was no immediate response from India’s Ministry of External Affairs or the US embassy in New Delhi to requests for comment on the report, the Reuters news agency said.
The FT report said the sources did not say if the protest to India resulted in the plot being abandoned by the plotters, or if it was foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The protest to New Delhi was registered after Prime Minister Narendra Modi was welcomed on a state visit by President Joe Biden in June, said the report, which came two months after Canada said there were “credible” allegations linking Indian agents to the June murder of a Sikh separatist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in a Vancouver suburb.
India has rejected Canada’s accusations.
Apart from the diplomatic warning to India, US federal prosecutors have also filed a sealed indictment against at least one suspect in a New York district court, the FT report said.
Pannun, like Nijjar, is a proponent of a decades-long, but now fringe demand to carve out an independent Sikh homeland from India named Khalistan.
Canada worked “very closely” with the US on intelligence that Indian agents had been potentially involved in Nijjar’s murder, a senior Canadian government source told Reuters news agency in September.
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The FT report said the US shared details of the thwarted plot with a wider group of allies after Canada’s public accusation.
In September of this year, the US stated clearly that it expected the Indian government to cooperate with Canada in the case of the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
“We are deeply concerned about the allegations that Prime Minister Trudeau has raised,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters. “It would be important that India work with the Canadians on this investigation. We want to see accountability.”
The Canadian government has amassed both human and signals intelligence in a months-long investigation into the Sikh separatist leader’s murder, CBC News reported.
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The report said the intelligence included communications of Indian officials present in Canada, adding some of the information was provided by an unidentified ally in the Five Eyes alliance – an intelligence-sharing network that includes the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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