The Print says that India’s top spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), has stopped working at its North American stations for the first time since it was founded in 1968.
They did this because they were about to file criminal charges against an Indian resident who they say planned to kill a pro-Sikh activist in New York.
The US Justice Department said on Wednesday that an Indian government official planned a failed attempt to kill a Sikh separatist in the US. They also announced charges against a man who they say planned the murder.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said that Nikhil Gupta, 52, worked with the Indian government worker, whose job included security and data gathering, to kill a person in New York City who supported a Sikh sovereign state in northern India.
While in India, the suspect planned to kill in New York City a US citizen of Indian descent who had spoken out in favour of a separate country for Sikhs, according to a statement from Damian Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
This comes two months after Canada said there were “credible” claims that Indian spies were involved in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a leader of a Sikh separatist group, in a suburb of Vancouver in June. India has denied these claims.
When Pakistan’s Foreign Office heard about India’s role in an arbitrary killing in Canada, it said that the news showed that India’s “network of extraterritorial killings had now gone global.”
Quotes from sources told The Print that two top RAW officers were told to leave their jobs in major Western cities earlier this summer while US prosecutors made a decision. The report also said that RAW couldn’t change its station head in Washington, DC.
The officers were fired as part of a series of actions meant to show anger over what the US, Canada, and the UK saw as violations of the unwritten rules that govern how RAW works in those countries, according to the story.
In the message, it was said that the officers were in charge of the RAW station in San Francisco and its operations in London.
The Print reported that RAW’s stations in San Francisco and Washington, DC, have been shut down. This comes after Pavan Rai, the station chief in Ottawa, was publicly fired. This is the first time since the agency’s founding in 1968 that it does not have a presence in North America.
It was said in the report that US prosecutors said an accused drug dealer named Nikhil Gupta was offered up to $150,000 by someone saying they worked for Indian intelligence to set up the murder of an unnamed lawyer and activist for Khalistan.
In a story citing sources, The Print said that the Indian government’s decision to kick out the RAW officer in San Francisco was meant to make it clear that the US would not work with Indian intelligence if it continued to carry out offensive operations in the West.
India has said that it doesn’t like that Sikh rebel groups are active in other countries, like Canada and the US. The groups have kept the Khalistan movement going, which calls for a separate Sikh state to be made from India.
A bomb went off on an Air India Boeing 747 flying from Canada to India in 1985, killing all 329 people on board. The bombers were thought to be Sikh radicals.
