Canada documentary reveals: Modi directly ordered killing of Nijjar, Pannun

LONDON: There is overwhelming evidence suggesting that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally ordered the killing of Khalistan activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar and directed the murder for hire plot of pro-Khalistan Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, according to a bombshell documentary aired on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

The hour-long investigative documentary - The Fifth Estate - aired exclusive footage of the moment when Nijjar was killed by two Indian state agents as he left Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia, on the evening of June 18, 2023. The video showed Nijjar leaving the parking lot of the Gurdwara in his pickup truck and a car of assassins driving along with his truck, quickly pulling ahead and then blocking the exit. The two hit men then come out and fire bullets on Nijjar, killing him on the spot and then escaping in a silver Toyota Camry.

The Fifth Estate documentary said it was due to the shock and the overwhelming evidence of Indian role that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau openly accused that the government of India ordered the killing — a claim that has severely damaged diplomatic ties between Canada and India.

The documentary made shocking new revelations and revealed details of how deeply the Indian state has been involved in planning to kill pro-Khalistani Sikhs, mainly Pannun and Nijjar but also several others.

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun told the documentary he believes Modi, on the advice of his National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, personally sanctioned Indian spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief Samant Goel to carry out the assassination plots, involving their diplomatic missions and the agents posted there as diplomats.

The SFJ leader told the TV channel: “I have no doubt that Narendra Modi ordered the killing of Nijjar and therefore the culpability is on the Indian state. I will be shocked if the Indian High Commissioner in Canada doesn’t know who will be hired and who will be killed. When you put a bounty on Nijjar’s head and my head and offer rewards to locate him and me in Surrey and in New York then what do you expect.”

As Pannun spoke, the CBC aired footage of Indian TV’s announcing bounty on their heads and glorifying the assassinations of Sikhs.

The documentary showed that the assassination threat of Pannun, who is running a worldwide Sikh Referendum campaign, is so serious and imminent to the US intelligence that at least seven security men guard him at all times, make him to move from house to house and enter his apartment for checkups before he’s allowed in to ensure hired assassins are not hiding inside.

The documentary said the coordinated attack on Nijjar involved six men and two vehicles. The Fifth Estate spoke to two witnesses who saw the killing.

The first witness said: “I tried to press his chest and tried to shake him to see if he was breathing. But he was totally unconscious. He was not breathing.” He said he chased the two men until they got into the Toyota Camry.

“A car came from around the alley and they got into it. There were three others sitting in that car,” he said. “We could smell the smoke from the guns, the smell of the guns was everywhere.”

The CBC said that Indian government and media were mocking Trudeau for months saying there is no evidence of Indian involvement until November last year when the evidence turned up in New York City when a US indictment was unsealed by the US Department of Justice, revealing details of the foiled plot to kill Nijjar’s friend and leader Pannun.

The indictment accused Indian national Nikhil Gupta of attempting to arrange the killing of Pannun at the behest of Indian intelligence officers who were secretly filmed by the US intelligence while planning the killing of Nijjar and Pannun.

According to the indictment, the plot was foiled when Gupta mistakenly reached out for help hiring a hitman to a person who turned out to be a confidential informant reporting to US law enforcement. Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic on June 30, 2023, on charges of conspiring to murder and is awaiting extradition to the US.

The CBC said the indictment has also revealed allegations that the Indian government was planning at least three more killings in Canada last June.

The CBC said, quoting the US indictment, that hours after Nijjar was killed on June 18, Gupta sent a video of Nijjar’s body to the person he was trying to hire as a contract killer and told him to kill “quickly” the New York target, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual Canadian-American citizen who is general counsel for Sikhs for Justice.

Pannun told The Fifth Estate about his close friendship with Nijjar and shared commitment to campaigning for Khalistan.

“Nijjar told me that Canadian intelligence agencies have approached him just a day before that and they warned him that his life is in danger,” Pannun told The Fifth Estate’s Bob McKeown. “That day, he sounded very, very concerned.”

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was visited by RCMP officers and given a duty to warn two days before he was killed.

Pannun told the documentary that the non-binding Khalistan Referendum across the western countries are the reason he and Nijjar became targets of the Indian government. He said the Canadian intelligence should tell what steps they had taken to protect Nijjar.

“We follow the international laws and we campaign let the Sikh people, the indigenous people of Punjab, to give them a chance to vote,” he said. “That’s the reason they killed Nijjar, that’s the reason they wanted to kill me, to stop a peaceful democratic process of Khalistan referendum.”

The Fifth Estate also aired interviews of five other Canadian Sikhs, all of them supporters of Khalistan, who have been served with “duty to warn” notices by the Canadian police which means their lives are at risk from the Indian state. The notices are served to individuals the police believe are likely targeted and in imminent danger due to threats to their lives.

The documentary said that multiple duty to warn notices and the details of the US indictment point to “three targets” in Canada but the role of Indian in other killings in Canada cannot be ruled out.

Pro-Khalistan Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a strong supporter of an independent Sikh homeland known as Khalistan, was leading Sikhs For Justice and Chief Coordinator of Khalistan Referendum campaign in Canada. He was a close associate of the SFJ founder and New York lawyer Pannun, who was subject to Indian assassination plan at the same time but his murder plan was foiled by the US security agencies. Nijjar was also President of Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in British Columbia – Canada’s biggest Gurdawara.