Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: On May 2, 2011, the US Navy SEALs shot and killed Osama bin Laden, who founded the Islamist terror group al-Qaeda, at his compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.
The US charged Osama, born in Saudi Arabia and studied in the United States and the United Kingdom, with masterminding the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 in America. No one perhaps asked Washington for proof to support its claims.
Now, barely two weeks before voting for a new President and after using Canada as a proxy against India, the same self-righteous America is accusing India of trying to eliminate “an American citizen.” Without naming him in the case, the US is sheltering Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh Khalistani militant and a Canadian-American citizen now, designated as a terrorist by India.
Believing in ‘Our terrorist is a terrorist but your terrorist is our citizen,’ America, whom Iran denounces as ‘Great Satan,’ has now claimed that an Indian official tried to kill an “American citizen.”
The US Department of Justice has maintained that Vikash Yadav, 39, an Indian R&AW official, was involved in a plot to kill the separatist Sikh American national last summer in and around the state visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Its federal prosecutors leveled these allegations on Thursday in a case filed in a US court in New York.
The federal lawyers claimed that Yadav was employed by the Cabinet Secretariat, which houses India’s foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW).
Yadav, who is believed to be no longer a government employee, was charged with three counts, including murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
He remains at large, the Department of Justice said.
His co-conspirator Nikhil Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic in 2023 and is languishing in a US jail after extradition.
US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said Thursday’s charges demonstrate that the Justice Department will not tolerate attempts to target and endanger Americans and to undermine the rights to which every US citizen is entitled.
Yadav allegedly conspired with a criminal associate and attempted to assassinate a US citizen on American soil for exercising their First Amendment rights, said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
New Delhi has stoutly denied its association or involvement with such a plot to kill an American national on US soil. Following allegations by the US, New Delhi had set up an inquiry committee to investigate the matter. The US has expressed satisfaction with India’s cooperation on this.
Unsealing of the second indictment comes within 48 hours of an Indian Enquiry Committee visiting here to meet with an inter-agency team of officials from the FBI, Department of Justice, and the State Department on these issues.
“We are satisfied with the cooperation. It continues to be an ongoing process. We continue to work with them on that, but we do appreciate the cooperation, and we appreciate them updating us on their investigation as we update them on ours,” State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.
In the Thursday meeting, “we updated we being the US government broadly updated members of the Committee of Inquiry about the investigation that the United States has been conducting. We’ve received an update from them on the investigation that they have been conducting. It was a productive meeting, and I will leave it at that,” Miller said.
They did inform us that the individual, who was named in the Justice Department indictment, is no longer an employee of the Indian government, he added.
Running into 18 pages, the indictment that was unsealed Thursday posts pictures of Yadav in a military dress and also gives a picture of two persons exchanging dollars in a car in New York, which federal prosecutors said was the money being paid to the alleged killer by a person on behalf of Gupta and Yadav to assassinate the Sikh Separatist leader in New York. The picture is dated June 9, 2023. The name of the Sikh separatist, a US citizen, is not mentioned in the indictment.
By indicting the then R&AW official Vikash Yadav in the alleged murder-for-hire plot, the US Government has reassured its commitment to a fundamental constitutional duty to protect the life, liberty, and freedom of expression of the US Citizens at home and abroad, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel to a separatist Khalistani outfit ‘Sikh for Justice,’ said in a statement after the indictment was released by the Department of Justice.
The damaging indictment alleges that Yadav along with his co-conspirator Nikhil Gupta plotted to kill the Sikh separatist leader in the summer of 2023. For this Gupta hired an individual to do the kill job. The unidentified individual, who was an informant to the FBI asked for USD 100,000 for the job and received USD 15,000 as an advance payment on June 9, 2023.
In the same month, President Joe Biden had invited Prime Minister Modi on a historic state visit, which took place on June 22. According to the indictment, Yadav told Gupta and the hired killer not to do the job immediately before or during the State visit.
The indictment reveals that there was a link between the murder of another Sikh separatist Nijjar in Canada during the same period. Federal prosecutors have shared communications between Yadav, Gupta, and the alleged killer on the two incidents.
A few minutes later, Yadav messaged Gupta, instructing: “Let them also verify on their own… if they can get some proof that he is inside, it will be a go-ahead from us,” a reference to giving the green light to assassinate the alleged victim as soon as it could be verified that he was at his residence,” the federal prosecutors alleged.
The Department of Justice said the /victim’ is a vocal critic of the Government of India and leads a US.-based organization that advocates for the secession of Punjab, a state in northern India that is home to a large population of Sikhs, an ethnoreligious minority group in India.
Pannun has publicly called for some or all of Punjab to secede from India and establish a Sikh sovereign state called Khalistan, and the Government of India has banned him and his separatist organization from India.
“The US law enforcement detected and disrupted the plot to murder the Victim,” it said.