Nijjar assassin arrested close to wedding with “who’s-who of Delhi’s Sikh enemies”

New information on the assassination of Shaheed (martyr) Bhai Hardeep Singh Nijjar has revealed one of the men in custody was arrested the day before a Toronto wedding that many prominent Khalistan activists attended.

The news about the arrest of Amandeep Singh in Brampton (Ontario) on 3rd November 2023 was revealed by CBC news last week, with the news outlet saying the wedding “brought together a who’s-who of New Delhi’s Sikh enemies“, suggesting Amandeep may have been there to assassinate attendees.

There are worries within the Sikh community about what could have happened if Amandeep – a noted criminal on the radar of Canadian authorities – was still at large during such a gathering. Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the General Counsel of Sikhs For Justice who is one of India’s most wanted targets, was set to attend before deciding against it due to security concerns. An Indian State plot to murder Pannun was later thwarted by the FBI.

Amandeep Singh is one of four men on trial for the murder of Shaheed Nijjar in Surrey (BC) in June last year. Amandeep was stopped twice before he was arrested in November, which saw him found in possession of a gun. He was initially charged only with firearms, drug and breach offences. Amandeep then spent six months in pre-trial detention before he was hit with an additional first-degree murder charge in the case of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Last month Global News discovered that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) attempted to pull Amandeep over on the 26th March 2023, about four kilometres from Guru Nanak Temple where Nijjar was shot. Amandeep failed to stop and was charged for the crime on the same day. He was released on an undertaking to appear in court in Surrey on the 16th June. Nijjar was killed two days later.

“This was the general perception in the community, that I would be attending a religious function, because that’s the only function I have ever attended in the past,” Pannun said to CBC. “If somebody is so close to our organization and so close to the Khalistan referendum campaign, I do go sometimes and attend their religious ceremony in the gurdwaras. Until a day or so (before), I was very sure that I would go.”

Community figure and BC Gurdwaras Spokesperson Moninder Singh, a close friend of Shaheed Bhai Hardeep Singh Nijjar who also received a “Duty to Warn” letter from the RCMP spoke, reiterating information from the FBI’s foiling of the Pannun assassination, which revealed there were “many targets” India was trying to kill.

“Looking back on that weekend, the types of arrests that were made of the fourth shooter in Hardeep’s case, now it seems like there’s a lot of dots that could be connected for that weekend. We have the U.S. indictment that comes out a couple of weeks later that says that it wasn’t just Hardeep. There were three or four other Sikh Khalistani leaders in Canada allegedly targeted by India. There may have been not a better opportune time than that weekend, when a lot of us were gathering, for something to actually potentially happen.”

The trial of Amandeep Singh, along with Karandeep Singh, Karan Brar and Kamalpreet Singh continues.