Assassination In Vancouver

Three people have been arrested in Canada for the assassination of the leader of a Sikh temple so let's have another look at this. I still maintain the opinion expressed here, that the Indian Government was likely not involved in it.

Relations between India and Canada were damaged by the accusation by the prime minister of Canada that the Indian Government was behind the June 2023 assassination of the leader of a Sikh gurdwara (temple), following a service at the temple, in the Vancouver BC suburb of Surrey.

Sikhism is a different religion from the majority Hinduism in India. The Sikh homeland is the northern state of Punjab. The Golden Temple is in the city of Amritsar. The Vancouver area is home to the greatest concentration of Sikhs outside India. People with roots in India make up about 4% of the population of Canada and about half of those are Sikhs. Sikhs also make up about 2% of the population of India.

In 1984 the Indian Army raided the Golden Temple. Later that year prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated in retaliation by two of her bodyguards who were Sikhs. This set off a long period of conflict between Sikhs and Hindus. Part of this conflict was the bombing of Air India flight 182 in 1985. The bomb originated in the Vancouver area.

The assassination of the Sikh temple leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was supposedly done because he was advocating a separate Sikh homeland in Punjab, to be known as Khalistan. Many people have gotten the impression that the wish for a separate homeland is more of an issue with Sikhs in Canada than with those in India. The government of India had accused him of terrorist activities. Canadian authorities had warned him that his life was in danger. A GPS tracking device had reportedly been found attached to his vehicle.

This assassination has roiled the alliance between the west and India. Canada and India, both members of the Commonwealth, have downgraded their diplomatic relations. The two countries are closely connected not only because 4% of the Canadian population has roots in India but because so many Indian students study in Canada.

Security cameras at the Sikh temple recorded everything that happened. The video has not been made public but has been seen by a number of people who commented on it and was somehow leaked to the Washington Post. Since the assassination happened outside the temple, on a main road, there were also witnesses.

The Sikh temple leader got into his pickup truck in the parking lot behind the temple. A white vehicle drove alongside the pickup truck. When the pickup truck drove faster the white vehicle drove faster also. As the pickup truck was about to pull onto the road the white vehicle cut in front of it.

When the pickup truck stopped two men with guns emerged. One account says that they emerged from the white vehicle but other accounts are that they were waiting at the side. The two gunmen fired about fifty bullets, and Hardeep Singh Nijjar was hit by more than thirty.

The white vehicle sped away. The two gunmen ran, crossing a nearby park, to a waiting Toyota. Considering that more than one person was seen in each vehicle, it is believed that at least six people were involved.

This image from Google Street View shows where the killing took place, as the pickup truck was about to pull into the road. The gunmen might have been waiting in the trees at right.

I am only going by what has been in the news, and clearly not all information has been released. But at this point I am not completely convinced that India was behind this assassination.

India's intelligence and security service, known as the Research and Analysis Wing, RAW or R&AW, is believed, like most similar agencies of other countries, to have carried out targeted killings. But it has never been known to have done it before in the west, in a closely allied country.

The Sikh homeland movement in Canada is very much a grass roots movement. It has no coordinated leadership. Killing the leader of one Sikh temple will in no way hinder the movement, it will only inflame it. This killing just gives the Sikhs a martyr to rally around.

In 2018 a Saudi journalist that was critical of the government, Jamal Kashoggi, was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he is believed to have been killed and dismembered. Whatever the Saudi government may have gained from it was not worth one percent of the international backlash that it caused. Why on earth would India want to do the same, potentially ruining it's lucrative relationship with the west, with a killing that would only make things worse anyway?

If India was trying to quell the Sikh separatist movement then why on earth would it carry out this killing at a Sikh temple, which is an insult to the Sikh religion. He was a plumber by trade, and plumbers make house calls. Why not just call him to a plumbing job and make him disappear? This doesn't make sense.

The killing absolutely does not look like the work of a professional security organization. It looks more like a gangland hit out of the movies. In recent times there has been killings by national security organizations but when have you ever seen the dramatic overkill of firing more than thirty bullets into someone?

Professional security agencies always put strong emphasis on physical fitness for field agents. Witnesses reported that one of the gunmen was heavy and had difficulty running.

This operation was complex and risky, the killers might have been caught if police response had been quicker. A real professional security organization can kill someone quickly and quietly, without six people being involved.

What is so interesting is that one of the Sikhs that had been found not guilty of involvement in the Air India bombing of 1985 was also killed by gunmen in Surrey BC, while in his vehicle. His name was Ripudaman Singh Malik. The killing happened outside the family business, just as this killing happened outside the Sikh temple. The two killings took place less than 3 km apart and it happened less than a year before this targeted killing. Two gunmen were caught but neither was Indian and I have not seen any suggestion that India was behind it, although many Indians were upset that Canada only ended up convicting one person for the bombing.

What is concerning about all of this is that, somewhere out there, a third party who may wish to fracture the alliance between India and the west only has to kill a prominent Sikh and make it appear that India was behind it.