On Sunday, after riddling a automotive with bullets in a car parking zone, two masked, heavyset males made a run for it and jumped right into a getaway automobile close to a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, the police mentioned.
The sufferer, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, was a distinguished Sikh neighborhood chief and president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, a temple the place he was shot. He advocated the creation of Khalistan, an unbiased Sikh nation carved out of areas together with the Indian state of Punjab.
The killing has put Surrey, dwelling to one of many largest Sikh populations in Canada, on edge. Some within the nation’s Sikh neighborhood say they suppose the capturing of Mr. Nijjar, whom India had declared a wished terrorist, was a political assassination, although the police haven’t launched a motive.
The shooters waited for Mr. Nijjar for an hour earlier than the lethal assault on Sunday night, mentioned Sgt. Timothy Pierotti of the Built-in Murder Investigation Staff, a department of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at a information convention this week. The Mounties had been in any other case tight-lipped and wouldn’t affirm whether or not different legislation enforcement businesses, together with Canada’s spy company, had been collaborating within the investigation.
Jagmeet Singh, chief of the New Democratic Social gathering, referred to as on Marco Mendicino, Canada’s public security minister, to handle allegations from the Sikh neighborhood that Mr. Nijjar had been warned, days earlier than his loss of life, that his life was in peril.
“Following this brazen act of violence,” Mr. Singh mentioned in a letter, “the Sikh neighborhood feels much more anxious.”
Tejinder Singh Sidhu, president of the World Sikh Group of Canada, a nonprofit, mentioned in a press release that Mr. Nijjar had “overtly and repeatedly said that he could be focused by Indian intelligence.”
Earlier this month, Jody Thomas, Canada’s nationwide safety adviser, named India as a serious actor in international interference — which incorporates actions like election meddling and disinformation campaigns on social media — at the same time as Canada ventures to forge deeper ties with the nation.
However doing so stays difficult, as political tensions proceed between the Indian authorities, which is pursuing Hindu-nationalist insurance policies, and the Sikh diaspora in Canada. (Sikhs are a non secular minority in India, making up lower than 2 p.c of the nationwide inhabitants.)
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s international minister, mentioned as a lot earlier this month, after movies on social media confirmed a parade float in Brampton, Ontario, that depicted the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the previous Indian prime minister. Ms. Gandhi was shot by two Sikh bodyguards within the aftermath of violence that gripped the Indian state of Punjab in 1984.
“I believe it’s not good for the connection, and I believe it’s not good for Canada,” Mr. Jaishankar mentioned throughout a information convention.
My colleague in New Delhi, Karan Deep Singh, who watched the information convention, has been following the information surrounding Mr. Nijjar’s loss of life.
He famous {that a} November 2020 cost sheet filed by India’s Nationwide Investigation Company mentioned that Mr. Nijjar was accused of finishing up terrorist assaults in India and that he had been “attempting to radicalize Sikh neighborhood the world over in favor of creation of ‘Khalistan.’”
“He has been attempting to incite, Sikhs to vote for secession, agitate in opposition to the federal government of India and perform violent actions, via varied posts, audio messages and movies posted on social media,” the company wrote.
Mr. Nijjar denied these accusations in Canadian media stories.
“Surinder Singh Jodhka, a professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru College in New Delhi, advised me that although the separatist motion in Punjab had barely any sympathy among the many common Sikh, each in 1984 and immediately, the neighborhood has not forgotten the toll of the violence,” Karan mentioned in an e-mail.
Within the days following Ms. Gandhi’s loss of life in October 1984, riots and retaliatory violence killed at the least 3,000 folks, most of them Sikhs within the capital, New Delhi, in line with authorities estimates. Sikh organizations have estimated the loss of life toll to be a lot larger.
“There’s a clear, rising prejudice in opposition to Sikhs,” Mr. Jodhka advised Karan. Mr. Jodhka mentioned that some members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Social gathering in India had publicly welcomed the perpetrators of violence in opposition to Sikhs.
The killing of Mr. Nijjar got here nearly a yr after one other high-profile killing in Surrey: that of a Canadian Sikh man, Ripudaman Singh Malik, who was acquitted in 2005 within the Air India bombings, which killed 329 folks touring to New Delhi from Toronto in 1985. Mr. Malik, 75, was shot in a residential neighborhood, and two males of their 20s had been later arrested.
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Vjosa Isai is a reporter-researcher for The New York Occasions in Canada. Comply with her on Twitter at @lavjosa.
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