NEW DELHI (Reuters) -U.S. authorities thwarted a plot to kill a Sikh separatist in the United States and issued a warning to India over concerns the government in New Delhi was involved, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed sources.
There was no immediate response from India’s foreign ministry, or from the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, to requests for comment on the report.
The Financial Times said that the sources did not say if the protest to India resulted in the plot being abandoned by the plotters, or if it was foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The protest to New Delhi was registered after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was welcomed on a state visit by President Joe Biden in June, the report said.
The report comes two months after Canada said there were “credible” allegations linking Indian agents to the June murder of a Sikh separatist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in a Vancouver suburb.
India has rejected Canada’s accusations.
Apart from the diplomatic warning to India, U.S. federal prosecutors have also filed a sealed indictment against at least one suspect in a New York district court, the FT report said.
The paper identified Gurpatwant Singh Pannun as the target of the foiled plot.
The FT report said Pannun had declined to say whether U.S. authorities had warned him about the plot, but quoted him as saying he would “let the U.S. government respond to the issue of threats to my life on American soil from the Indian operatives”.
Pannun, like Nijjar, is a proponent of a decades-long, but now a fringe demand to carve out an independent Sikh homeland from India named Khalistan.
Canada worked very closely with the United States on intelligence that Indian agents had been potentially involved in Nijjar’s murder, a senior Canadian government source told Reuters in September.
The Financial Times report mentioned that the U.S. shared details of the thwarted plot with a wider group of allies after Canada’s public accusation.
(Reporting by Shivam Patel, Krishn Kaushik in New Delhi; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Alex Richardson)
