What is the Bishnoi gang and how could it be linked to Hardeep Singh Nijjar's killing?

The three men charged in the alleged conspiracy to murder Hardeep Singh Nij‐ jar - Karan Brar, Kamal‐ preet Singh and Karanpreet Singh - are all believed to be connected to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, ac‐ cording to sources involved in the Nijjar investigation.

Canadian police sources say the Bishnoi gang is one of a number of criminal en‐ terprises from the Punjab and Haryana states in northern India that have spread into North America in recent years, even as its founder Lawrence Bishnoi has languished in Indian pris‐ ons since 2014.

Many features of the gang culture from which the Bish‐ nois emerged would be fa‐ miliar to observers of North American organized crime. Others are distinctly Indian.

Punjabi gangsters rap on YouTube, flash guns, vehicles and bling on Instagram and issue threats via Facebook. While a gang might murder in response to a rival's diss track, the same gang might vow revenge for the violation of a religious taboo, as the Bishnois have against one of India's most famous movie stars.

Their violence is partly rooted in village codes of ho‐ nour and vendetta, but it's mainly driven by modern im‐ peratives of business and politics. Indian media de‐ scribe drug smuggling and extortion as the gangs' biggest sources of income, both at home and abroad.

Nijjar, a prominent Sikh activist, was gunned down outside his gurdwara in Sur‐ rey, B.C. last June. In Septem‐ ber, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose in the House of Commons to state that "Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a po‐ tential link between agents of the government of India" and Nijjar's killing.

The three men arrested on Friday face first-degree murder and conspiracy charges in the Nijjar case. The men have not yet filed pleas in court.

Bishnoi appears to have started his criminal career as a student at the University of Punjab together with a friend, Satinderjeet Singh, more commonly known as

Goldy Brar, according to Indi‐ an media reports. Both were sons of police officers and in‐ volved in student politics.

Drugs and extortion

The gang found opportunity in Punjab's ongoing drug ad‐ diction crisis, which began with Afghan heroin but has been morphing into a North American-style deluge of opi‐ oid pills known locally as nasheeli goliyaan or "intoxi‐ cating tablets."

Their business model also extends to demanding pay‐ ments from prominent Pun‐ jabis, especially entertainers and those in the "liquor mafia," India's large network of clandestine bootleg dis‐ tillers.

That extortion network soon spread to Canada, says former West Vancouver police chief Kash Heed, who also served as B.C.'s solicitorgeneral and minister of pub‐ lic safety.

"Some of the information I'm very familiar with be‐ cause the victims have spoken to me and they paid the demand," he told CBC News.

"From what I understand, the contact is made through some type of international telephone line. It is made di‐ rectly to affluent South Asian business people, whether they're involved in some type of manufacturing industry or they're involved in real estate and home building.

"And it's more of a be‐ friending for the first few phone calls. And around the third phone call, there is a threat of violence and the de‐ mand for money made."

Heed said the extortion‐ ists often claim links to law enforcement. "It's not only connected to the organized crime group known as the Bishnois back in India," he said. "It's also connected to some of the criminal justice people in India, whether it's related to policing or the prosecutorial level in India."

Heed said millions of dol‐ lars have been paid to extor‐ tionists in B.C., with some vic‐ tims receiving letters that purport to come from the Bishnois.

"We're not sure whether that was copycat individuals," he said. "But what we're cer‐ tain of is the majority of the people that were doing the groundwork, doing the threatening that were in‐ volved in it, came over here on some type of immigration policy from India and may have had strong connections back to their homeland.

"They seem to have done their homework because the individuals that they select, they know what their busi‐ ness is here in Canada. They know whether this is opensource information or just as‐ sociated to someone who their family members are. And they also know if they have relatives or property back in India, especially in the Punjab state where a lot of these people coming from.

"I strongly believe that a lot of the copycats that are using the Bishnoi name don't have any connection whatso‐ ever to that organized crime group," Heed added. "But I also believe some of them do have some type of relation‐ ship or connection."

Prison bars no impedi‐ ment to gang business

Lawrence Bishnoi has been in prison for almost a decade since a shootout with Ra‐ jasthan police but has man‐ aged to continue his activi‐ ties, allegedly with the help of corrupt officials at differ‐ ent prisons.

Indian media claim he di‐ rects a network of 700 gun‐ men who enforce his extor‐ tion orders across five Indian states.

While Bishnoi is not known to have set foot per‐ sonally in Canada, other prominent figures in his net‐ work have - most notably his brother Anmol Bishnoi and his early associate Goldy Brar, according to "lookout circulars" issued by Indian police.

Goldy Brar is wanted in both India and Canada and was at one point one of Canada's 25 most-wanted.

Brar claimed to have or‐ dered the hit on another

Punjabi with strong Canadian connections: singer and politician Sidhu Moose Wala, who lived for some years in Brampton, Ont. and attended Humber College. Indian police have alleged that while Lawrence Bishnoi was in Ti‐ har prison in New Delhi, he tasked Brar with the murder.

Both Anmol Bishnoi and Goldy Brar have been spot‐ ted recently in the central valley of California; a video showed Anmol Bishnoi at a Punjabi musical performance in a private California home.

Last week, it was widely (and wrongly) reported in In‐ dian media that Goldy Brar had been killed in a double shooting in Fresno. In fact, the men shot had no known connection to India.

Goldy Brar is not related to Karan Brar, one of the three men charged in rela‐ tion to Nijjar's killing, ac‐ cording to investigators.

A drive-by targets a Bol‐ lywood icon

The Bishnoi gang is currently at the centre of a major news story involving India's most famous movie family, the Khans.

Two weeks ago, drive-by shooters fired into the Mum‐ bai home of Bollywood heartthrob Salman Khan, who is out on appeal after being convicted of poaching

a blackbuck antelope consid‐ ered sacred by the Bishnoi people.

Anmol Bishnoi claimed re‐ sponsibility for that shooting and warned that the gang is still gunning for Khan. Lawrence Bishnoi, whose in‐ carceration in maximum-se‐ curity prisons seems to pose no barrier to his communica‐ tions with the outside world, threatened Khan on video in 2018.

"When we do it, you'll know about it. We're going to kill Salman Khan in Jodhpur," he said.

India's official reaction to the arrests of three of its citi‐ zens has been to claim that their presence is a product of Canada's own laxness.

In Odisha state on Satur‐ day, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar said "somebody may have been arrested there, police may have done some investigation, but the fact is a number of gangland people with organized crime links from Punjab have been made welcome in Canada."

"We have been telling Canada, saying, 'Look, these are wanted criminals from In‐ dia," he added. "You have giv‐ en them visas, you let them have come, many of them, in false documentation. And yet you allow them to live there.'

"If you decide to import for political purposes people with very dubious, actually very negative background, there will be issues. They have in some cases created problems in their own coun‐ try as a result of their own policies."

The arrests posed no problems for the govern‐ ment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he added in comments during a forum for Indian intellectuals in Bhubaneswar.

"Now, why would we fear?" he said. "I mean, if something happened there it is for them to worry about."

Federal Immigration Min‐ ister Marc Miller on Monday declined to comment on the immigration status of the al‐ leged hit squad members, citing an ongoing police in‐ vestigation.

"The Indian foreign minis‐ ter's entitled to his opinion," he said. "It's just not accu‐ rate."

Are states using gang‐ sters as assassins?

The use of criminal networks by foreign governments to carry out or support over‐ seas operations is the fastest-growing area of na‐ tional security law enforce‐ ment, investigators say.

Another prominent exam‐ ple that involved some of the same Canadian investigators involved in the Nijjar case was the Iranian government's alleged plot to kill dissidents living in Maryland. U.S. au‐ thorities accuse two B.C. Hel‐ ls Angels of contracting with Iranian drug dealer Naji Ibrahim Sharifi-Zindashti, act‐ ing on behalf of the Iranian government, to carry out the hits.

U.S. authorities also ac‐ cuse India of using a criminal go-between, Indian drug dealer Nikhil "Nick" Gupta, to hire a hitman to kill a promi‐ nent Sikh activist, reported to be close Nijjar collaborator Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York. Unluckily for Gup‐ ta, the hitman he tried to hire was - according to an un‐ sealed indictment - a confi‐ dential informant for the Drug Enforcement Adminis‐ tration.

Canadian investigators are actively investigating the possible links between the Nijjar murder and a murder in Winnipeg on Sept. 20, 2023. The victim, Sukhdool Singh Gill, was both a gang enemy of the Bishnois, as a member of the rival gang of Devinder Bambiha, and also a political enemy of the gov‐ ernment of India as a Khalis‐ tani sympathizer who had appeared on an Indian gov‐ ernment "terrorist" listing the day before his murder.

In a Facebook post, Lawrence Bishnoi said that

Sukhdool was a drug addict and claimed his death was payback for various killings, some of which also blurred the lines between criminality and politics.

Bishnoi signed off with the words "Jai Shree Ram," a slogan critics say is associ‐ ated with the Hindu su‐ premacism of Modi's govern‐ ment, and in recent television interviews from prison he has described himself as a Hindu nationalist and gov‐ ernment supporter.

Investigators say the abundance of possible mo‐ tives - political, criminal and personal - for killing Sukhdool Singh Gill make it hard to determine whether his killers were acting on be‐ half of the government of In‐ dia, or merely conducting their own gang business.

WATCH | 3 men charged in Nijjar killing linked to gang: