Contract Killing of General Counsel Thwarted

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an immigration law specialist with offices in New York and California, recently discovered there was a price on his head.

Reuters reports that Pannun is also the General Counsel of Sikhs for Justice, which advocates for a Sikh homeland on the subcontinent. That puts him at odds with India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The Prime Minister is best known for his animosity toward Muslims, but he doesn’t like Sikhs either.

Pannun’s organization describes itself as a human rights advocacy group. Pannun often posts video messages on its behalf on social media. India’s anti-terror agency recently filed a case against him for advocating separatism and holding referendums overseas to establish an independent state.

The agency alleges that he threatened Air India’s passengers in a video, claiming that their lives were in danger. Pannun told Reuters his message was to boycott the airline, not bomb it, and called the case against him “frivolous.”

The Modi administration frowns on such frivolity. “CC-1, a senior field officer with responsibilities in security management intelligence” under Modi was identified, in a recently unsealed federal indictment, as the person who hired Nikil Gupta, an international drugs and weapons trafficker, to find a contract killer and pay him to murder Pannun.

U.S. intelligence was all over Nikil Gupta and his mission. They’d been alerted when another advocate of Sikh separatism, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was murdered in Canada.

The hitman Gupta hired was a special agent of the FBI. Gupta is reportedly being held for extradition in Czechoslovakia.