Indian government employee charged in foiled murder-for-hire plot in New York City

The Justice Department announced criminal charges Thursday against an Indian government employee who specialized in intelligence in connection with a foiled plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader living in New York City.

Vikash Yadav, 39, faces murder-for-hire charges in a planned killing that prosecutors first disclosed last year and have said was meant to precede a string of other politically motivated murders in the United States and Canada.

Yadav remains at large, but in charging him and releasing his name, the Biden administration sought to call out the Indian government for criminal activity that has emerged as a significant point of tension between India and the West over the last year — culminating this week with a diplomatic flare-up with Canada and the expulsion of diplomats.

“The FBI will not tolerate acts of violence or other efforts to retaliate against those residing in the U.S. for exercising their constitutionally protected rights,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.

The criminal case against Yadav was announced the same week as two members of an Indian inquiry committee investigating the plot were in Washington to meet with U.S. officials about the investigation.

“They did inform us that the individual who was named in the Justice Department indictment is no longer an employee of the Indian government,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters before the case against Yadav was unsealed. “We are satisfied with cooperation. It continues to be an ongoing process.

On Monday, Canada said it had identified India’s top diplomat in the country as a person of interest in the assassination of a Sikh activist there and expelled him and five other diplomats.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and police officials went public this week with allegations that Indian diplomats were targeting Sikh separatists in Canada by sharing information about them with their government back home. They said top Indian officials were then passing that information along to Indian organized crime groups who were targeting the activists, who are Canadian citizens, with drive-by shootings, extortions and even murder.

India, for its part, has rejected the accusations as absurd, and its foreign ministry said it was expelling Canada’s acting high commissioner and five other diplomats in response.

The murder-for-hire plot was first disclosed by federal prosecutors last year when they announced charges against a man, Nikhil Gupta, who was recruited by a then-unidentified Indian government employee to orchestrate the assassination of a Sikh separatist leader in New York.

Gupta was extradited to the United States in June from the Czech Republic after his arrest in Prague last year.

The rewritten indictment said Yadav recruited Gupta in May 2023 to arrange the assassination. It said Gupta, an Indian citizen who lived in India, contacted an individual at Yadav’s direction, believing the individual to be a criminal associate. Instead, the indictment said, the individual was a confidential source working with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The indictment said Gupta asked the individual to help contract a hitman to carry out the murder, promising to pay $100,000. Of the $100,000 due for the attack, $15,000 was delivered by a Yadav associate to the DEA undercover source in Manhattan, according to the arrangements made by Yadav and Gupta, the indictment said.

Authorities said Yadav, a citizen and resident of India, directed the plot from India while he was employed by the government of India’s Cabinet Secretariat, which houses India’s foreign intelligence service. Yadav has described his position as a “Senior Field Officer” with responsibilities in “Security Management” and “Intelligence,” the Justice Department said.

As the assassination plot was created in June 2023, Yadav gave Gupta personal information about the Sikh separatist leader, including his home address in New York City, his phone numbers and details about his day-to-day movements, which Gupta then passed along to the undercover DEA operative, according to court papers.

Yadav directed Gupta to keep him updated regularly on the progress of the assassination plot, leading Gupta to send him surveillance photographs of the intended victim, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who advocated for the creation of a sovereign Sikh state, the indictment said.

U.S. authorities have said the killing of Pannun was to have occurred just days after Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist who had been exiled from India, was shot and killed outside a cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, on June 18, 2023. Prosecutors say the goal was to kill at least four people in Canada and the U.S. by June 29, 2023, and then more after that.

In a statement, Pannun said the indictment means the U.S. government has “reassured its commitment to fundamental constitutional duty to protect the life, liberty and freedom of expression of the U.S. Citizen at home and abroad.”

He added, “The attempt on my life on American Soil is the blatant case of India’s transnational terrorism which has become a challenge to America’s sovereignty and threat to freedom of speech and democracy, which unequivocally proves that India believes in using bullets while pro Khalistan Sikhs believe in ballots.”

Neumeister reported from New York.