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The inside story of how two alleged murder plots brought India, the US and Canada to a diplomatic crisis. Share this article ONE The lawyer was being watched. Gurpatwant Singh Pannun’s schedule was predictable: a regular commute in Queens between his law office and his home, along with visits to a gym and a cafe. For the men who began tailing him in the spring of 2023, getting a sense of his routine was easy. It helped, too, that Pannun was easy to spot, in his mid-50s, with a thick gray beard and an ink-black turban, marks of his Sikh faith. From a short distance away, the surveillance team took photos of him walking out of his house, entering his car, cooling down after a workout. Half a world away from New York, Nikhil Gupta was waiting eagerly. Gupta was a medium-time New Delhi hustler with links to the drug trade, according to legal filings, who for several weeks had been in regular contact with an officer from India’s main foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW. Federal prosecutors allege that the spy had offered a deal: He would make a criminal case against Gupta go away, if Gupta helped to resolve a delicate matter overseas. “Nobody will ever bother you again,” the officer promised. Now, Gupta was attempting to fulfill his end of the bargain. Pannun was a key figure in the Khalistan movement, a campaign to create an independent Sikh homeland centered on the Indian state of Punjab. The Indian government regards advocacy for Khalistan as an unacceptable threat to its sovereignty and has charged the movement’s leaders, including Pannun, with terrorism and other criminal offenses. Yet Western law enforcement agencies have generally declined to act against the campaigners, and as a US citizen, Pannun was free to continue his work, organizing protest marches and broadcasting speeches on social media. By May 2023, Gupta and his RAW handler were allegedly seeking to silence him permanently. Late that month, filings say, Gupta asked a contact in the US to connect him with a contract killer who could take Pannun out. Several days later, Gupta spoke on the phone with his contact, urging him to “finish him, brother, finish him, don’t take too much time.” Soon, Gupta was receiving photos of Pannun going about his daily life. He sent his handler regular updates, subsequently cited in court documents, that emphasized he understood the need for expediency. “Spoke with the NY group,” Gupta texted. “Told them they have to discharge [Pannun] as soon as possible.” Then, on the night of June 18, 2023, the RAW officer sent Gupta a video clip, which showed a bullet-ridden body slumped in the cab of a pickup truck. The victim was Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a friend of Pannun’s and a fellow leader in the Khalistan movement. Hours earlier, two masked gunmen had ambushed Nijjar as he departed a temple in a suburb of Vancouver, shooting him 34 times. Gupta immediately forwarded the video to his contact in New York, filings say. After the murder in Canada, Gupta warned, Pannun “will be more cautious, so we should not give them the chance, any chance.” Gupta said he wanted results: “If he is not alone, there are two guys with him in the meeting or something … put everyone down.” Within weeks of that message, Gupta and his handler’s alleged pursuit of Pannun would be brought to the attention of the highest levels of the US government. (Gupta has denied wrongdoing.) According to people familiar with the matter, US intelligence agencies assessed that the operation had probably been sanctioned by senior figures in New Delhi, potentially including members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inner circle—an extraordinary gamble. The idea that Indian officials would even contemplate killing a US citizen on the streets of New York stunned people in the White House and the State Department, who’d done everything in their power to court the world’s most populous country. The government of Canada was facing an equally challenging set of problems: how to demand accountability for Nijjar’s killing, which security officials separately concluded was directed by elements of the Indian state, and how to avoid further violence against Canadians whom India saw as threats. Over the ensuing months, investigators in Washington, New York, London and Ottawa worked to unravel what they believed to be a deadly Indian intelligence operation unfolding in North America, and to ensure that nothing of its kind was ever attempted again. These would be delicate tasks with any foreign nation; they were devilishly complex with India, a rising economic superpower that Western governments are counting on to offset China. This account of the targeting of Pannun and Nijjar, and the geopolitical crisis that followed, is based on legal filings and government documents, as well as interviews with people with knowledge of the situation, almost all of whom asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic. Attorneys representing Gupta didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a 2023 petition to the Supreme Court of India, he said that he was a “hapless victim caught in the crossfire” of geopolitics, and that the allegations against him were “a case of mistaken identity.” The filing called it an “absurdity” that Gupta would be engaged in “alleged covert operations and assassinations on US soil when he has no connections or business in the country.” The Indian Ministry of External Affairs didn’t respond to a detailed request for comment on this story. In the past, Modi’s government has called allegations that it was involved in the killing of Nijjar “absurd.” In Pannun’s case it has responded more equivocally, setting up an “Enquiry Committee” to investigate in consultation with the US. Foreign assassinations are a tool in some global powers’ strategic arsenals. US administrations of both parties have frequently conducted targeted killings in the Muslim world and more recently the Caribbean and Pacific, while deaths from bombs, bullets or poison have been attributed to Russia or Israel. Modi, for his part, has suggested that India is entitled to hunt down those it considers enemies. Last April, he addressed a crowd in Maharashtra state. After boasting about his country’s economic achievements, he came to the topic of security. Alluding to terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, which saw a Pakistani-based group kill more than 160 people, he noted that previous Indian governments would “send dossiers” when they wanted to bring enemies to justice. That was over, Modi said: “Today, India eliminates terrorists on their home turf.” TWO There are 20 million to 25 million Sikhs in India, representing less than 2% of the population. Unlike Hindus, who far outnumber them, they’re monotheistic, believing in a single divine being whose presence manifests equally for all. Yet despite their modest numbers, Sikhs have played an outsize role in India’s history, marked especially by a series of late 20th century crises. Amid demands for greater autonomy, some turned to violence in the early 1980s, staging bloody attacks on government officials and civilians. Then, in June 1984, the military began Operation Blue Star, an assault on separatists who’d installed themselves in the holiest Sikh site, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar. To the government of the day, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the raid was essential to protect the integrity of the Indian state; to many Sikhs, it was a desecration of a sacred shrine. According to official figures, about 575 people were killed, but Sikh groups put the total much higher. What came several months later was no less traumatic. On the morning of Oct. 31, 1984, Gandhi left her residence in New Delhi for a TV interview. As she walked past a guard post, two members of her security staff, both Sikh, opened fire and killed her. Gandhi was struck by dozens of bullets; according to prosecutors, the bodyguards were seeking vengeance for the events in Amritsar. Riots erupted across India, escalating to scenes of brutal violence. Some Sikhs were burned alive; others were pulled from buses and motorbikes and savagely beaten by mobs. Officials in Gandhi’s Congress Party were accused of encouraging the attacks, for example by distributing voter lists that helped assailants identify Sikhs’ addresses. Thousands died. In the years that followed, many Sikhs decided to join a growing diaspora, particularly in the US, the UK and Canada, which today has a Sikh population of about 800,000, by far the largest outside India. Some emigrants pursued violence against the Indian state, including the men responsible for the bombing of Air India Flight 182, a Boeing 747 that exploded over the Atlantic in 1985, killing 329 passengers and crew. One of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history, the event carries a significance in India’s collective memory that’s often compared to the effect Sept. 11 had on the US. The suspected masterminds, who lived in Canada, largely avoided prison time, with the leader of a later public inquiry saying the investigation was hamstrung by “error [and] incompetence.” A far larger number of the Sikhs who departed built normal lives, integrating into their new societies. The flames of Khalistan activism never died out, however, and Pannun and Nijjar, members of a generation that experienced the 1980s crises as children, became leaders in the campaign in adulthood. (The name of the hypothetical state is drawn from Khalsa, a term for the Sikh community.) They spent much of their time delivering speeches at temple meetings and protests. They also began making plans to hold “referendums” among overseas Sikh communities, asking voters to declare their support for independence. These referendums would be purely symbolic, and hardly reliable indicators given that the likeliest people to vote would have the strongest feelings on the issue. Moreover, Sikh nationalism in India itself was marginal, and Sikhs were well represented among the country’s elite. The prime minister from 2004 to 2014, Manmohan Singh, was a member of the faith, and under Modi, Sikhs have continued to serve at the highest levels of the military and civil service. In other words, the chances were remote that Nijjar, Pannun and their small band of fellow activists could seriously threaten the Indian state. Nonetheless, Indian policymakers were intensely interested in their activities, especially as Modi consolidated power. One Western diplomat recalls being surprised by his Indian counterparts’ “absolute laser focus” on the Khalistan movement. The campaign “ought to be a third-order preoccupation at most, but it is utterly first order for them,” the diplomat says. Some observers saw a cynical political motive: By insisting the movement was a genuine threat, Modi and his lieutenants could portray themselves as defenders of the Hindu majority. But their anxiety was also rooted in real historical events—the killing of Indira Gandhi and the Air India bombing, along with the large number of less publicized attacks—as well as an understandable fear, in a nation of enormous diversity, of the notion that any part could break away. Nijjar, who had been living in Canada since 1997 and became a citizen 10 years later, was a particular focus of their attention. By his account, he’d been arrested and tortured as a young man in Punjab, during a police roundup of Sikh youths. In exile he built a significant following and, in 2018, became president of a large temple, the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, near Vancouver. According to people with knowledge of the matter, Indian law enforcement agencies frequently contacted their Canadian counterparts to insist that Nijjar was involved in terrorism and demand they act against him. In 2019 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detained him for questioning about Indian claims that he had a role in an impending attack. But nothing in the evidence India presented, the people say, met the standard for criminal charges in Canada, let alone for extradition. To press their case, officials in New Delhi frequently sent clippings from Indian media, which was rife with lurid stories about Nijjar’s alleged involvement in violence, instead of providing what the process required: hard evidence, obtained without coercion, that would stand up in a Western courtroom. When that didn’t work, the people say, the Indians suggested that Canadian police find a way to concoct the necessary evidence. The result was mutual incomprehension. To law enforcement agencies in Canada, Nijjar was an activist, unless India could persuasively demonstrate otherwise. To Indian police and their political overseers, he was a terrorist, as the country formally designated him in 2020. The conventional wisdom in New Delhi was that this standoff reflected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s domestic interests—specifically, his desire to court Sikh voters, who are a meaningful factor in Canadian elections. Similar political incentives didn’t apply to Washington, though, and when the Indian government sought action against Khalistan campaigners in the US, the response was much the same as in Canada. Pannun, like Nijjar, was listed as a terrorist by Indian authorities, and they considered the group he was part of, Sikhs for Justice, to be an “unlawful organization.” The group’s messaging was often inflammatory, including posters calling on supporters to “burn [the] Indian constitution” and “balkanize India.” Yet in Queens, Pannun lived unmolested, as did fellow activists elsewhere in the country. Regardless of India’s demands, he and Nijjar were going to continue their campaign—unless events intervened. THREE Wiry and fit, with a square jaw and thick brown hair, Nikhil Gupta described himself in his 2023 Indian court petition as a “law-abiding middle-class businessman.” This was almost certainly not the whole story. Since 2016, and possibly before, according to legal filings and law enforcement officials, Gupta had been at least talking about brokering deliveries of narcotics and weapons across borders. He traveled extensively, visiting Dubai, New York, Los Angeles and Central Asia, and claimed in conversations to have links to an international network of drug traffickers. (Gupta’s US lawyers have said that government evidence of such statements is “uncorroborated.”) For most Western intelligence agencies today, it would be unusual to rely on someone with a comparable background: Such people are often untrustworthy, untrained in operational security and liable to attract the attention of law enforcement. But in India, security officials tend to be more experienced working with the underworld. Many of the men who’ve headed RAW started out as police officers, as did the country’s most prominent intelligence official, national security adviser Ajit Doval. By Gupta’s later account, described in government records of an interview with US investigators, the events that put him in contact with a RAW officer began in 2021, when he was informed that he was expected in court regarding a robbery he denied having anything to do with. (Gupta has disputed certain aspects of these records, telling a US court that neither investigator “brought up the allegations in this case” during the interview.) He said he asked friends if they knew anyone who could help clear his name; eventually, he was contacted by a man calling himself Amanat who indicated he could assist. It’s not clear whether Gupta knew Amanat’s real identity at this point, or whether Gupta understood that he worked for RAW. In Gupta’s telling, Amanat wore a mask and hat to their first meeting and shared almost nothing about himself. But by early May 2023, they were communicating over WhatsApp on a regular basis. Anxiety over Khalistan activism was then running high. That March, police in Punjab had undertaken a massive manhunt to arrest an advocate whom they accused of a range of crimes. In response, overseas Sikh groups staged rowdy demonstrations; at the Indian consulate in San Francisco, protesters broke windows and spray-painted a wall. According to people familiar with the bilateral relationship, Indian officials were frustrated by what they saw as a tepid US response to the incident; in their view, one of the people says, it was only a matter of time before an Indian diplomat was hurt or even killed. For years, Nijjar, who was married and had two sons, had been receiving phone calls from unknown numbers, the voices on the other end claiming that he and his family would be killed unless he stopped his campaign. Then, in July 2022, police arrived unannounced at his home. According to a person who was present, they explained that they had reason to believe Nijjar’s life was in danger. His English was shaky, so his son translated the warning into Punjabi. As the officers continued, they noticed Nijjar was chuckling. “I don’t think he’s getting it,” one of them said. In fact, Nijjar understood what he was being told, but his attitude was fatalistic. “You don’t walk on this path thinking that you’re going to live a very long time,” he explained through his son. Similar warnings were being given to other Khalistan activists in Canada. The police told Nijjar they couldn’t offer more specific information or provide him with protection. They nonetheless wanted to keep in touch, and Nijjar began meeting regularly with RCMP officers and agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country’s principal spy agency. Still, he refused to scale back his activism, reasoning that if someone wanted him dead, he was having a real impact. Khalistan campaigners keep in constant touch online, and when one of their number was killed in the spring of 2023, Nijjar learned of it almost immediately. According to the Indian government, Paramjit Singh Panjwar was the leader of a militant outfit known as the Khalistan Commando Force, and he’d been designated a terrorist under the same law as Nijjar and Pannun. On May 6 two men on a motorbike ambushed Panjwar in Pakistan, where he lived, and shot him dead. No one publicly claimed responsibility for his assassination, but to Nijjar and his compatriots, what had happened was obvious: India had killed him. The same day, the RAW operative Gupta knew as Amanat allegedly texted him a message that would later be cited in federal court: There was a “target in New York,” Amanat wrote. “We will hit our all Targets [sic],” Gupta replied. Less than a week later, the RAW operative assured Gupta that the criminal case against him had “already been taken care of.” Soon, Gupta was discussing his assignment with a contact in the US. According to legal filings, Gupta understood this man to be a Colombian cocaine supplier; they had known each other since 2013 and had previously discussed drug and weapons deals, though never to the point of completion. In their 2023 conversations, the filings allege, Gupta explained that he needed help arranging for Pannun to be killed. The contact indicated that he was open to the proposal and asked for more details, including whether Gupta was willing to pay his asking price: $100,000. Gupta sent screenshots of the exchange to Amanat, who replied, “Ok … the whole money will be paid with in [sic] 24 hours after the work is done.” With the price agreed upon, the contact said he would speak to his associates about the next steps. But the contact, and his associates, weren’t who Gupta thought they were. FOUR Gupta had been on the radar of the US Drug Enforcement Administration for the better part of a decade, according to legal filings. On at least two occasions in the previous eight years, he’d allegedly discussed organizing large shipments of heroin, boasting that he had contacts in Afghanistan and the ability to move drugs into countries including South Africa and Thailand. These conversations had made their way back to the agency, but Gupta never followed through with the deliveries and wasn’t charged. Now, though, he’d made a mistake. The contact he’d allegedly asked to help him carry out a murder in New York was a paid DEA source. When the source reported the plot, a new investigation began, initially landing with a joint DEA and New York Police Department unit known as Redrum—an homage to The Shining—that focuses on violent drug crimes. It was soon clear this wouldn’t be a routine case. The first indication was the target for the hit, a political campaigner whose capture the Indian government had been seeking for years. Notably, India had previously asked for a “red notice” on Pannun from Interpol—a kind of all-points bulletin to the world’s police forces. (Interpol declined, with an internal panel ruling that New Delhi hadn’t provided sufficient evidence linking Pannun to criminal activity.) Another sign of a political dimension was Gupta’s seeming concern about an upcoming visit to Washington by Modi, which would include a state dinner at the White House. On a call with the DEA source in early June, Gupta cautioned that “our prime minister Modi is visiting America on 20th … at the time of our prime minister visit, it’s not good.” Investigators couldn’t tell whether these and other comments by Gupta meant he really was working for some part of the Indian government, but they were alarmed enough to escalate the matter to the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, in Washington. Agents also approached Pannun to warn him that he was being targeted and ask for a small measure of cooperation. They wanted to conduct mock surveillance of his daily routine and send the pictures to Gupta, to convince him that the men he was talking to in New York had eyes on the lawyer. Pannun didn’t object, and on June 4 the DEA source sent Gupta one of the images, explaining that Pannun would be killed as soon as an advance payment arrived. Soon after that, the source put Gupta in direct contact with a supposed hit man who was, in fact, an undercover NYPD officer. The next step for investigators was to establish Gupta’s seriousness. Amanat encouraged him to move quickly, filings say, messaging him on June 9, a Friday: “Let’s activate the team and get it done this weekend.” The same day, Gupta told the undercover officer that someone would be in touch to deliver a “parcel.” Sure enough, just after 10 a.m. New York time, the “hit man” received a call from someone working with Gupta, who said he had “15k to give to you.” They met later that day in the undercover officer’s car, according to filings, not far from Penn Station in Manhattan. A stack of hundreds, complemented with a single $1 bill in the style of a South Asian wedding gift, changed hands. Several days later, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed a brief, sealed indictment of Gupta on murder-for-hire charges. Then, filings say, he sent a message that made matters significantly more complex. Almost from the beginning of his dialogue about Pannun with the DEA source, Gupta had suggested that there could be “more jobs.” On June 14 he hinted at where the next one could take place. “We will be needing one good team in Canada,” he wrote. FIVE Hours after Gupta’s message about a target in Canada, another Khalistan activist, Avtar Singh Khanda, died in a British hospital. The official cause of death was acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer that can advance with terrifying speed, and there was no evidence of foul play. Nonetheless, Khanda’s friends and family were suspicious. As far as they knew, he’d been healthy, and he was the second prominent Khalistan campaigner to die suddenly in as many months, after Panjwar in Pakistan. Some Canadian Sikhs feared that Nijjar would be next. On Friday, June 16, one of his friends and fellow activists, Moninder Singh, called an evening meeting at the Guru Nanak gurdwara. He shut the door and turned to the others. “He’s number one on their list,” Singh said of Nijjar, who was also in the room. “They’re going to kill him, and then we’re all going to say we should have done something.” When not working on Khalistan advocacy, Nijjar ran a plumbing business, and his movements were predictable. The group resolved to begin working on new security protocols for him starting on Sunday, less than 48 hours later. The next day, Nijjar tried to reach Pannun, his counterpart in Queens. The two men finally connected by phone late in the evening. Nijjar said Canadian security agencies had warned him once more that his life was in danger. He was scheduled to meet with CSIS agents again in a few days. Yet his concern was for Pannun. “Your name is also out there, so you better be careful,” Nijjar said. This wasn’t news to Pannun, but he thanked Nijjar for the heads-up and asked, “So what are you doing?” Nijjar laughed, much as he had when receiving his first warning from police the previous year. “I’m going to continue,” he said. “I’m not going to disappear.” Nijjar spent much of the next day, Sunday, at the gurdwara, meeting supporters and giving a speech warning that he might not survive to continue his campaign. Just before 8:30 p.m., he climbed into his gray Dodge pickup and began driving out of the parking lot. As he approached the exit, a white sedan stopped in front of him. At that moment, two masked men emerged from the edge of the property. They approached Nijjar’s vehicle, raised their guns and started shooting, shattering the driver-side window. Then they fled down a residential street and into a park. It was a warm late spring evening, and the area was busy with families out for strolls and a group playing soccer. When they heard the shots, some of the players took off after the assailants. They almost caught up to the slower of the two in the middle of the park, but as they got close, he turned around and pointed his weapon at them. They briefly stopped, giving the man time to run ahead into a cul-de-sac, where he and the other gunman entered a second sedan and sped away. By the time police arrived, the killers were long gone. To the DEA and others in the US government, Nijjar’s killing provided more proof that Gupta was serious and that Khalistan activists were at extreme risk. The following day, according to filings, Gupta had a call with the officer posing as a hit man. He explained that Nijjar had also been “the target” and “we have so many targets … the good news is this: now no need to wait.” In another call, this one with his initial contact, the DEA source, Gupta said “we have to finish four jobs” by the end of June—starting with Pannun. Agents from the FBI, which had joined the investigation as its significance became clear, began contacting other Khalistan campaigners across the US, warning them of threats to their safety. Meanwhile, the DEA started working on a plan to arrest Gupta, which would mean somehow getting him out of India. Investigators’ preference was to lure him to a meeting in the US, but he was reluctant to make the trip. Instead, they began working on a backup plan. Putting together such an operation begins with a kind of Venn diagram. One circle encompasses nations that have favorable extradition treaties with Washington; the other contains places where a defendant might be persuaded to travel without raising suspicion. In Gupta’s case, the circles overlapped most promisingly in the Czech Republic. The DEA source told Gupta that if they wanted to keep doing business, they needed to speak in person, and on June 19 Gupta agreed to a meeting in Prague. He booked a ticket via Istanbul, departing 10 days later. In the interim he continued pressuring the supposed hit man to take Pannun out. “Keep eyes at his house, his office and the cafe he used to visit,” Gupta told the undercover officer, according to filings. Two DEA investigators from New York, Mark Franks and Jose Sandobal, flew to Prague ahead of Gupta’s arrival. Late in the day on June 30, they drove to Vaclav Havel Airport with Czech police, who told them to stay in the vehicle. Gupta was disembarking from his flight, rolling a small suitcase with a neck pillow clipped to the handle. Plainclothes officers stopped him inside the terminal. One of the Czech personnel texted an update to the waiting Americans: “your man has just been arrested!!” Gupta was taken to a small room where police took a Vivo phone and two iPhones from him, with Gupta providing the passcodes. He was then handcuffed and led out of the building and into a car, where Franks and Sandobal were ready for him. Still in cuffs, he took a seat between the pair. Exactly what Gupta said in the car is in dispute. What is clear, however, is that the group investigating him considered the day a success. Later, one of the prosecutors assigned to the case texted a group chat that included Franks and Sandobal to ask “Is he talking?” Franks replied, “We had limited time. He did but he was playing f--- f--- games. We think he will ultimately cooperate.” Another prosecutor messaged the chain: “Did we grab phones?” “Yes,” Sandobal wrote. “He gave the codes to unlock them to the arrest team.” “Outstanding,” the prosecutor responded. SIX In Canada, meanwhile, Nijjar’s murder was national news. Initially, intelligence agencies told Trudeau there was no compelling evidence the crime was politically motivated, according to testimony he gave at a later public inquiry. It was more likely instead, they said, to have been “gang-related or criminal-related.” At the time, “there was not an obvious, immediate international nexus to this,” Trudeau recalled. RCMP detectives in British Columbia, however, viewed the situation differently. There was no evidence that Nijjar had criminal links, and he was well known to the agency for his activism and for the Indian government’s enmity toward it. His fellow Khalistan campaigners, meanwhile, were convinced the shooting had been ordered in New Delhi. Minutes after arriving at the scene of the killing, Nijjar’s friend Moninder Singh had told a crowd that had gathered: “Make no mistake, this is a political assassination.” As this allegation circulated in the media, Trudeau’s advisers asked security agencies to undertake a fresh assessment. While that effort was underway in late July, according to people familiar with the situation, the government received word that the UK, one of Canada’s partners in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, had obtained some relevant information. The matter had to be treated with extreme sensitivity. The British intelligence would need to be delivered by hand, kept off electronic systems and distributed to only a tiny number of Canadian officials, their names approved by London in advance. With those conditions agreed upon, a British intelligence officer carried the file into a government building in Ottawa. It was a summary and analysis of conversations intercepted by the UK’s signals intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, between individuals whom British analysts believed were working on behalf of the Indian government. Earlier in the year, they’d talked about plans to attack three targets: Nijjar, Pannun and Khanda, the activist who’d died in a British hospital. The document didn’t name the people whose conversations had been tapped or Nijjar’s assassins, but the implication was clear to the analysts: There was a strong chance he’d been murdered in an operation directed by the Indian state. Within an hour of receiving the British document, Trudeau’s national security and intelligence adviser, Jody Thomas, arranged to brief her boss. The prime minister and a few close advisers gathered in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—a secure conference room designed to be impervious to eavesdropping. Thomas put the file in front of Trudeau to read. He betrayed little emotion and pivoted quickly to the next steps, asking for options on how Canada could respond. Over the next several days, Canadian security agencies corroborated the initial intelligence. They also received another British wiretap, this one capturing a conversation referring to how Nijjar had been successfully eliminated. The consensus among Trudeau and his team was that the government needed to confront India with what it had learned. It also began to coordinate closely on the matter with the Biden administration. By late summer, officials in Ottawa and Washington understood that they were looking at two sides of the same coin: a murder in British Columbia and an attempt to arrange one in Queens. In New York, the DEA and FBI were trying to learn more about Gupta, who remained in a Czech prison while extradition proceedings progressed. From the start, one of their priorities was to identify the person directing his activities—the man Gupta knew as Amanat, with whom he’d exchanged at least 500 WhatsApp and Signal messages in the two months before his arrest. Once they had access to Amanat’s contact information, investigators ran it through various government databases. They got a hit. A matching phone number had been listed on a US visa application by an Indian flight attendant; it belonged to her husband, a man named Vikash Yadav. There was a further clue in the Gazette of India, a government publication that lists official appointments. A 2013 edition had recorded the resignation of a Vikash Yadav from a role in the Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary organization that supports law enforcement. The announcement said he was leaving his post after being selected as a “senior field officer” in India’s Cabinet Secretariat. In New Delhi, the nature of this vague position is widely understood: It’s a euphemism for working at RAW. SEVEN Yadav was born and raised in Pranpura, a village on the hot plains of Haryana state. He’d joined the CRPF in 2009, when he was 24. In a photo obtained by US prosecutors from a search of his Gmail account, he looked strikingly handsome, wearing a trim camouflage uniform over his muscular frame. Despite the secretive nature of his intelligence work, he generated a modest paper trail, including a case regarding the terms of his employment that he filed with a civil service tribunal. The filings included his home address, in a middle-class neighborhood not far from RAW headquarters. Investigators’ increasing certainty that Yadav worked with Gupta to carry out a murder in New York created a significant problem for Joe Biden’s White House. The administration was investing heavily in its relationship with India, not least by hosting Modi’s state visit to Washington in June 2023. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, and Kurt Campbell, his top emissary for Asia, had come to see New Delhi as a cornerstone of long-term plans to contain China. This strategy wasn’t without its critics, since India isn’t a formal (or even informal) US ally. Some in the State Department and Congress saw the decision to treat it similarly to one as overoptimistic, presuming a convergence of interests, and values, that didn’t necessarily exist. The White House learned of the developing Pannun investigation not long after Modi’s trip. According to people familiar with the discussions, policymakers’ first question was obvious: How high did the plot go? The people say it was the assessment of US intelligence agencies, albeit with a degree of conjecture, that it had likely been authorized by senior figures in Modi’s government—potentially including Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, who’s one of Modi’s closest allies, and Samant Goel, the head of RAW at the time. The leaders of the Indian security state have a reputation as micromanagers, and it was highly implausible, in the view of US analysts, that such a plan would have proceeded without a go-ahead from at least some of them. (Shah and Goel didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Administration officials were astonished by the apparent plot, the people say—and furious. The US drone strikes that began during the “War on Terror” and continued in more limited fashion under Biden occurred largely in combat zones or little-governed places such as Somalia and Yemen, not on the soil of friendly democracies. Attempting to murder a US citizen in an American city would be a fundamental breach of trust at any time, and Modi had just been feted with a 400-guest state dinner. That very day, Yadav sent a message to Gupta, telling him that if his contacts in New York were able to determine that Pannun was at home, “it will be a go ahead from us.” What was more, the operation had been remarkably amateurish—penetrated by the DEA almost from the outset and directed by a handler who used a traceable phone. Some observers might note, “well, the United States does this all over the world,” one of the people says. But “we don’t do it in India.” Nonetheless, foreign policy officials soon determined that the American response would be muted, with no strong measures like sanctions on Indian personnel, and would be communicated entirely in private, at least until court proceedings made it impossible to keep the matter quiet. The message the White House delivered, via CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and other senior staff, was straightforward. First, the Pannun plot was unacceptable, and the US needed a commitment that nothing like it would happen again. Second, India needed to determine who in its hierarchy was behind the operation and hold them accountable. If those conditions were met, the case would be treated as a challenge that could be overcome, rather than a reason to fundamentally reconsider the US-India relationship. In response, the people familiar with the discussions recall, Indian officials indicated that they understood the depth of American displeasure, even if they didn’t accept responsibility. (They were also intensely curious about how US investigators had managed to obtain so much evidence.) Thomas, Trudeau’s national security adviser, made her own trip to New Delhi around the same time. She’d secured a meeting with Doval, her Indian counterpart, before the Canadian government received the British intelligence about Nijjar’s killing. One of its goals was to work toward a reset of the countries’ security relations after years of tensions over Khalistan activism. But by the time Thomas landed in India in August, carrying a burner phone and only paper documents, she had prepared for a very different kind of discussion. According to public testimony and people with knowledge of the conversation, she and Doval sat down in a private meeting room, facing each other in ornate armchairs. Despite an outsize reputation—he’s regularly described as the “Indian James Bond”—Doval is unusually short, and Thomas towered over him. After some pleasantries, he began complaining about Canada’s policies. His objections were familiar: People designated as terrorists in India were living in Canadian suburbs; Trudeau was unwilling to do anything about them because he depended on Sikh votes; and when India sent extradition requests, his government failed to act. “You hide behind free speech and tolerate hate,” Doval declared. He spoke for perhaps 40 minutes, going well past the time allotted for the entire meeting. When he finished, opening the floor to Thomas, she began to read from a script. Her remarks were intended to make clear how much she knew about Nijjar’s murder, without giving away intelligence sources or compromising the police investigation. “This was a criminal act on Canadian soil,” she said. “We have evidence that leads us to conclude that India was directly involved. We are investigating and we anticipate making arrests.” While she said Canada had no intention of going public, she noted that in Ottawa, as in Washington, sensitive information tends to leak. “One way or another, this will come out,” she warned. Thomas proposed an alternative: The Canadian government was willing to work with India to get to the truth of what had occurred. But Doval wouldn’t engage with the suggestion, the people with knowledge of the conversation say. He tried to take control of the discussion, insisting they needed to leave for a larger gathering of security and foreign policy officials. Thomas repeated her script there, then again in a separate meeting with India’s external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. After hearing Thomas out, Jaishankar’s response was blunt. “This did not happen,” he declared. Biden and Trudeau flew to New Delhi in September, for a meeting of the Group of 20 major economies. Each spoke privately with Modi, with Biden saying his government knew about the role of Indian personnel in the Pannun case, and Trudeau doing the same with respect to Nijjar. That knowledge was still being closely guarded. But shortly after Trudeau’s return to Ottawa, his office received word that the Globe and Mail was close to breaking the story. On Sept. 18, he delivered an unprecedented statement in the Canadian parliament. The government, Trudeau said, was “actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.” He called such an act “contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open and democratic societies conduct themselves.” India’s reaction was predictably explosive. Modi’s government accused Canada of permitting “a range of illegal activities including murders, human trafficking and organized crime.” It also threatened to revoke the immunity of more than 40 Canadian diplomats and suspended all visa processing for Canadian citizens. In Washington, foreign policy officials watched the unfolding dispute with dismay. Some felt that by going public in such a dramatic fashion, whatever his reasons, Trudeau had let domestic political considerations take precedent over wise foreign policy. Others were more sympathetic. After all, the intended victim in the US was still alive. Canada had a body. EIGHT As Trudeau’s allegations sparked an international crisis, Gupta remained in prison in the Czech Republic. The only public charges against him had been detailed in the brief indictment filed in New York before his arrest, which was unsealed after he was taken into custody. But federal prosecutors in Manhattan were working on a much more comprehensive filing, which would detail the alleged conspiracy to kill Pannun, including Gupta’s interactions with Yadav, his RAW handler. Once it was made public, the discreet approach favored by the Biden administration would be over. The National Security Council had been convening regular meetings on the issue, with representatives present from a range of government agencies, including the Justice Department. The resulting dynamic was complicated, for both the legal and foreign policy sides of the administration. By longstanding practice (at least outside of Donald Trump’s time in office) the direction of federal criminal proceedings is determined solely by the DOJ. Formally, its representatives were there to provide basic information about the Pannun investigation’s progress, and certainly not to take suggestions. But in this case, everyone involved understood that the department’s work could have significant effects on a bilateral relationship the White House was determined to protect. The revised indictment against Gupta was unsealed in late November. By this point, investigators had known Yadav’s identity for months, and he was arguably the central actor in the government’s narrative—the person who’d “directed a plot to assassinate, on U.S. soil, an attorney and political activist.” Prosecutors quoted extensively from WhatsApp messages they said Gupta had received from him, issuing specific instructions on how and when Pannun should be pursued. Yet Yadav himself wasn’t being charged, only Gupta, which also meant that under DOJ policy, the RAW operative couldn’t be named. He was described, instead, as an “Indian government employee,” without reference to which agency he worked for. (Yadav’s lawyer, R.K. Handoo, declined to comment on queries sent by Bloomberg Businessweek, beyond saying that “it appears an imaginary story is being made.”) The administration had warned India that an expanded indictment was coming, and its response was measured. A spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi said the US had shared “some inputs” that “impinge on our national security interests as well.” As a result, the Indian government was setting up “a high-level Enquiry Committee” to examine the matter. It was roughly what Thomas had proposed to her Indian counterparts, only to be angrily dismissed, before Trudeau went public. In Congress, India’s announcement was greeted with skepticism. To members including Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the Pannun case was a signal that the US approach to Modi had become overly accommodating. Cardin had leverage; Congress had recently been asked to approve the sale of more than 30 MQ-9 drones to the Indian military. Cardin placed a hold on the sale, freezing its progress. His opposition represented a challenge for the White House, where officials viewed the drones as a key plank in security cooperation with India. Administration officials lobbied intensely, warning that delays could doom the transaction—and insisting they would demand accountability for the Pannun plot. The calls from the White House and the State Department continued for weeks. Finally, in February 2024, Cardin agreed to lift his hold. India would get its drones. NINE In Canada the investigation into Nijjar’s murder was proceeding along two tracks: finding the men who’d killed him and determining who’d directed them. Detectives concluded early in their inquiry that the assassins were hired guns, almost certainly without political motives themselves, people familiar with the matter say. Police worked outward from the crime scene in the parking lot of the gurdwara, canvassing neighbors for security camera footage and seeking data from cellular towers. They also identified the getaway car, a silver 2008 Toyota Camry. By late 2023, the RCMP was closing in on several suspects, all Indian citizens who had come to Canada on temporary visas. One of them, a man in his early 20s named Amandeep Singh, was already in jail. He’d been arrested near Toronto on Nov. 3, the day before a local wedding that Pannun and other Khalistan activists were expected to attend. In a search, police found a handgun with a laser sight and an extended, 24-round magazine that’s prohibited in Canada. They took Singh into custody on firearms charges, and the wedding proceeded without incident, though Pannun decided at the last minute not to go. Detectives began monitoring the other suspects while they gathered more evidence, seeking to ensure that none of them engaged in violence or attempted to leave the country, the people say. By May 2024, police were ready to act. Backed by heavily armed tactical teams, officers arrested three men in Edmonton, Alberta: Karan Brar, Kamalpreet Singh and Karanpreet Singh. All were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder; later in the month, Amandeep Singh was charged with the same offenses. (The four haven’t yet entered pleas. Amandeep Singh’s lawyer says that his client will be pleading not guilty to the homicide charges and that the earlier charges in Ontario have been stayed. Lawyers for Karanpreet Singh and Karan Brar declined to comment. A lawyer for Kamalpreet Singh didn’t reply to a request for comment.) As they kept investigating the Nijjar case, RCMP detectives were finding evidence of further assassination plots. By late 2024, police had learned of more than a dozen threats to the lives of people in Canada and were struggling to keep ahead of them. Investigators had concluded that they originated, in part, with intelligence collection by Indian diplomats. As a Trudeau adviser would describe it in later testimony, “This information is shared with senior levels of the Indian government, who then direct the commission of serious criminal activities.” Police were confident that at least some of the people tasked with carrying out the crimes worked for Lawrence Bishnoi, a notorious gangster who operates from a prison in Gujarat. It was an astonishing assessment, alleging that powerful officials in the government of a major economy were working with a criminal group to silence enemies on the other side of the world. In the summer of 2024, officials in Ottawa decided they needed to confront India with the evidence. It quickly became clear, however, that the Modi government wasn’t eager to hear from Canadian law enforcement. When an RCMP commander made plans to travel to New Delhi to discuss the issue, he couldn’t get a visa. The same officer then secured a meeting with Indian officials who were visiting the US. He flew to Washington for the appointment and was stood up. Trudeau’s team had a final avenue to try: Ajit Doval. The Indian national security adviser had spoken repeatedly with Thomas and her successor, Nathalie Drouin, over the previous year. The discussions were cordial but never yielded what the Canadians wanted: an agreement for India to hold an inquiry into Nijjar’s murder, as it was doing for the Pannun case. (In public, the Indian government said Canada hadn’t provided “specific or relevant evidence” about the crime.) In October, Drouin traveled to Singapore with the RCMP commander and a senior diplomat, where they planned to tell Doval some of what they had learned. The group gathered in one of the city-state’s luxury hotels. At first, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion, Doval claimed never to have heard of Bishnoi, then he dropped the pretense, noting that the gangster had a potent global network. Drouin and the others presented Doval with two options for cooperation: One, India could agree to waive the immunity of the diplomats who Canada believed had links to violence, allowing them to be questioned; or two, it could take responsibility for their actions, including by recalling the personnel from their posts and pledging to stop targeting dissidents in Canada. If neither of those was possible, the Canadians said, they would have no choice but to take a third, unilateral path: expelling the diplomats and going public with their concerns. Doval firmly denied that Indian diplomats were involved with crime and emphasized that his government would never admit any connection to Nijjar’s murder, the person says. But he did appear open to exploring some kind of arrangement that would allow the two countries to move forward. The discussion went on for hours, and at its conclusion Doval declared, “This meeting never took place.” The next day, a story about the meeting appeared in the government-aligned Hindustan Times. “India has made it clear to Canada that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cannot make unsubstantiated charges against the Modi government,” the article began. “The Indian position was conveyed to top security officials and diplomats of [Trudeau’s] government in a third country on Saturday.” From the Canadian perspective, the leak was a betrayal, and on returning home, Drouin and her colleagues activated the unilateral option. On Oct. 14 the RCMP held an extraordinary press conference in Ottawa, which its commissioner said followed “credible and imminent threats to life.” Six of India’s diplomats were expelled, including the ambassador, with Canada’s foreign ministry calling them “persons of interest in the Nijjar case.” Soon afterward, a senior Canadian official indicated in a public hearing that the government believed Shah, the home minister, was a key player in the campaign against Khalistan activists. The Modi government angrily denied the allegations and expelled an equal number of Canadian personnel from India; it also called talk of Shah’s involvement “absurd and baseless.” As the crisis deepened, an Indian delegation was in Washington for an update on the Pannun case. In the year that India’s internal inquiry had been underway, people familiar with the matter say, it had evolved in a clear direction: pinning responsibility for the targeting of Pannun on Yadav, and certainly not on anyone above him in RAW or Modi’s inner circle. This clashed with the view of US intelligence agencies, which had assessed that the operation had likely been authorized by senior officials. It also defied logic. Would a relatively junior officer really engage in such a high-risk plan without orders, or at least a green light, from his superiors? And how could this rogue officer have access to the kind of money—$100,000—that had been promised as payment for killing Pannun? US prosecutors had obtained Yadav’s tax statements, and that amount was about five times his annual salary. Nonetheless, the Biden administration was willing to accept India’s account. After the delegation’s visit, a State Department spokesman said the US was “satisfied with the cooperation” it had received. He noted that the administration had been informed that the operative identified as Gupta’s handler, who’d been left unnamed by the Justice Department up to that point, “is no longer an employee of the Indian government.” The next day, a new indictment was unsealed by federal prosecutors in New York. This one charged a second defendant: Vikash Yadav. TEN Over the past year, the US and Canada have both moved into new phases of their relationships with India. After speaking warmly of Modi in the first months of his new term, Trump has since turned on him, imposing 50% tariffs on Indian goods—ostensibly because of the country’s purchases of Russian oil and in retaliation for its own import levies. The Pannun case, however, does not appear to be among his grievances. In public comments, Trump has stayed away from the matter, saying in early September that apart from disagreements over trade, “we get along with India very well.” Trudeau’s successor as Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has tried to restore normalcy to interactions with New Delhi. He and Modi met at the Group of Seven summit in June, where they agreed to restore severed diplomatic relations. Some Sikh groups were outraged, but Carney had no real alternative: With Trump’s trade war pressuring its economy, Canada needs to develop new markets, and India is one of the obvious options. Neither North American government, however, can control what may emerge in criminal proceedings. Preparations continue for the trial of the four men charged with killing Nijjar, which doesn’t yet have a scheduled date. Canadian prosecutors don’t lay out their arguments in public ahead of time, so the details of their case will become clear only when the proceeding begins. It’s possible they’ll present evidence they say ties the defendants’ actions to Indian diplomats or even to specific officials in New Delhi. That could provoke another round of mutual accusations between Canada and India, threatening the rapprochement being attempted by Carney. Gupta was extradited to New York in the spring of 2024. Since then, he’s been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a facility on the Brooklyn waterfront that’s notorious for its poor conditions. If convicted on the three charges he faces—murder-for-hire conspiracy, murder for hire and conspiracy to commit money laundering—he could be sentenced to decades in federal prison. In the lead-up to his trial, which was recently delayed, his lawyers attempted unsuccessfully to invalidate swaths of the evidence being used against him, notably by arguing that the examination of his phones by Czech police and the transmission of their contents to the US constituted a warrantless search. (The DOJ disputed that investigators acted improperly.) Pannun, meanwhile, is still organizing referendums and advocating for the creation of Khalistan. He’s now protected by an armed security team and limits his movements around New York, driving between essential appointments in a three-car convoy with his bodyguards. He says, however, that if Indian officials want to kill him, he expects they’ll find a way. “I’m continuing my campaign,” Pannun vows, “and I will do it until the bullet comes.” Yadav has never publicly responded to his US indictment and remains at large. During discussions with the Indian government, people familiar with the matter say, the DOJ asked repeatedly for information on his status and what India planned to do to facilitate his extradition. The response, they say, was twofold: that the US hadn’t provided enough evidence to definitively prove his role in the Pannun case, and that whatever Yadav had done, India would deal with him.
