Alleged Indian Assassination Plot What We Know The Charges Activist Named as Target Read the Indictment Why Would India Take the Risk?

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       A Timeline of Plots Against Sikh Activists, According to Canada and the U.S.

       Officials in the United States and Canada have described two assassination attempts: the killing of a Sikh leader in British Columbia and a plan to murder an activist in New York.

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       Mourners carrying the coffin of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist who was murdered in June in British Columbia. Credit...Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

       By Derek M. Norman

       Nov. 30, 2023

       Federal prosecutors in the United States announced this week that they had charged an Indian national in a murder-for-hire scheme that targeted a Sikh activist in New York. The plot was foiled, they said, but it further complicated the delicate diplomatic relations between the United States, Canada and India.

       President Biden has sought to strengthen ties with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, amid rising tensions with China and a standoff with Russia. But prosecutors said the plan to kill the activist in New York was organized by an Indian government official — potentially disrupting the Biden administration’s outreach to India.

       The U.S. prosecutors also linked the plot to a murder in Canada last June. Relations between India and Canada had soured this fall after Canadian officials accused Indian government agents of the killing.

       Here is a timeline of the events as American and Canadian officials have laid them out.

       In or around May 2023 American prosecutors said that, around this time, an unnamed Indian government employee recruited Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, to orchestrate the assassination of a U.S. citizen, according to the indictment. The target of the plot described in court documents was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a vocal critic of the Indian government and the general counsel for Sikhs for Justice, which advocates the secession of Punjab, a state in northern India.

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