Nirmal Singh and Harjinder Kaur Dhaliwal are seen in Punjab after the death of their son. Brampton resident Jasvir Singh Dhaliwal was slain on the eve of his planned Valentine’s Day wedding.
Indian police seeking Canadian residents in hired-killer case tied to ex-girlfriend
May 18, 2008
Sonya Fatah
The Toronto Star
MOGA, INDIA–Jasvir Singh Dhaliwal’s wedding was meant to be a splendid countryside affair.
The deep-red cards were lettered in gold, a sign of the family’s new-found wealth and status in Canada.
Dhaliwal, a 27-year-old Brampton resident, returned to his family’s native village in India’s western state of Punjab to tie the knot on Valentine’s Day.
He had broken off with his girlfriend of four years in Canada to wed a young Punjabi woman who lived near his family’s village home.
The wedding never took place.
On Feb. 13, as Dhaliwal left a pre-wedding party with five of his relatives, a car screeched to a halt in front of his vehicle. One of its occupants emerged and sprayed Dhaliwal and a male cousin with bullets, killing both.
Dhaliwal’s death was another example, Punjab police allege, of Indo-Canadians and other Indians living abroad hiring assassins back in India to settle scores – ranging from broken hearts to perceived stains on honour and property disputes.
Indian police have issued a warrant for the arrest of the victim’s former Brampton girlfriend, Amanpal Gill, charging her with conspiracy to murder.
They have also arrested the jilted girlfriend’s Punjab-based parents, charging them with conspiracy to murder, and have issued a warrant for the arrest of her brother, Gurusewak Singh of Brampton, on a charge of murder.
Police records show he entered India shortly before the shooting and left the country shortly after.
Gurusewak Singh and the victim worked together at one time in Brampton as drivers for a trucking company.
Attempts to reach Amanpal Gill in Brampton by the Star were unsuccessful.
Ashwini Kumar, a police constable with the Indian Reserve Battalion, has been charged with first-degree murder in the case.
CONTRACT KILLINGS, called supari, have long been standard fare in Mumbai’s underworld.
Increasingly, however, ordinary non-resident Indians are turning to hired assassins to settle their scores.
“India today is a very different place,” said Gurpreet Singh Bhuller, senior superintendent of police for rural Ludhiana.
“Doaba (in central Punjab) has a long history of supari killings that started because many people from that area settled overseas, in the U.K., in America or in Canada.
“Later, when people from other parts of Punjab started going overseas, supari killings spread to those areas as well.”
In June 2000, Jassi Kaur Sidhu, an Indo-Canadian, was found with her throat slit in Punjab when her family refused to accept her love affair and marriage to a rickshaw driver.
Last month, the Punjab and Haryana High Court sentenced four of those accused in the case to life imprisonment, including the victim’s maternal uncle in Punjab and a police officer.
The victim’s mother, Malkiat Kaur, and uncle, Surjit Singh Badesha, remain free in Canada. They have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, Indian police say, and warrants for their arrests have been issued.
The police say they have made an extradition request to Canada. Ottawa says it does not comment on individual cases for privacy reasons.
Attempts by the Star to reach Kaur and Badesha in Maple Ridge, B.C., were unsuccessful.
Hired killers are relatively easy to find in Punjab, where unemployment, access to weapons and a sudden growth in local wealth as a result of rising property value, have fostered an underground trade in murder.
“The basic fact is there is plenty of unemployment, and we see so many luxurious things on television and cinema, and a lot of young kids are desperate to acquire those things,” noted Bhuller.
Drug use, in particular crack cocaine, is also on the rise.
Police estimate that assassins are hired for prices that run the gamut from $5,000 to $150,000.
They estimate that there have been about two dozen contract killings here since 2005.
“This sort of thing is hardly new here,” according to a Ludhiana businessman and former Sikh militant who did not want to be identified.
“People have killed in the name of honour for centuries. It’s just that now it’s not done directly by family members.”
CRIMES COMMITTED in India on behalf of non-resident Indians continue to grow in number.
One reason for such killings is a belief that the long arm of the law won’t reach perpetrators when the crimes are committed in far-off villages oceans away from the contractors’ new homes.
Canada’s Department of Justice received about 150 extradition requests from around the world last year for various types of cases but won’t give a breakdown.
The department uses a three-step process in deciding the case of a citizen or permanent resident for whom it receives an extradition request.
“After the minister of justice has made a decision based on the evidence, there is still an appeal stage,” said Christian Girouard, the department’s manager of public and media relations.
But because extradition procedures between the two countries can be so painfully slow-moving, people with a score to settle are increasingly resorting to Punjab-based killers, Indian police say.
“A lot of (non-resident Indians) feel very secure that extradition is not possible because it’s such a bureaucratic and delayed process,” said Bhuller.
“Moreover, most such transactions take place through (money transfers) leaving no proof and making it difficult to get them.”
OUTSIDE THE VIKRAJ marriage palace, a kilometre from where Jasvir Singh Dhaliwal was shot and killed, his parents talked about how they had been looking forward to back-to-back wedding ceremonies for their son, and then his sister – before assassins’ bullets turned their joy to grief.
Harjinder Kaur Dhaliwal, 59, kept her head bowed, occasionally moving a hand to wipe away tears. Her husband, 54-year-old Nirmal Singh, also spoke in hushed tones.
“I still can’t believe this has happened,” he said. “Canadian police should help us out. Our son is gone, but if they don’t catch his killer, he could do it again.”
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