Hardeep Singh Nijjar: The Killing in Surrey That Broke India and Canada Apart

Sunday, 18 June 2023, Surrey, British Columbia. It was Father’s Day in Canada, and the evening service at the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara on 120 Street had ended. The man who ran the gurdwara’s committee, a 45-year-old plumber named Hardeep Singh Nijjar, walked out to his pickup truck in the car park.

As he drove towards the exit, a car pulled across his path. Two men in hoodies ran at the truck and fired. Police received the first call at 8:27 p.m. By then the gunmen were gone, on foot to a silver Toyota Camry that was waiting nearby. Nijjar died in the driver’s seat. Reports later put the number of bullets that hit him at 34.

Within hours, Sikhs were gathering outside the gurdwara, and many said aloud what they believed: that India had killed him. India had long called Nijjar a terrorist. Three months later Canada’s Prime Minister stood up in Parliament and said, in effect, that his country’s spies were asking the same question. What followed was the worst break between India and Canada in their history: diplomats expelled on both sides, visas stopped, four young men from Punjab charged with murder, and, in the end, a reset that many Sikh Canadians feel came at their cost.

Nijjar was born on 11 October 1977 in Bhar Singh Pura, a village near Phillaur in Jalandhar district. He came of age in the last years of Punjab’s armed struggle, when police across the state were picking up young Sikh men by the thousand. On 10 February 1997 he landed in Canada on a passport in the name of ‘Ravi Sharma’ and asked for refuge, saying he had been tortured in India.

The refugee board did not believe him, and his appeal failed. Days after the refusal he married a woman who sponsored him. Officials suspected a marriage of convenience, but he was allowed in, and Canada’s immigration minister later said he became a citizen in 2007. He built a plumbing business, raised two sons, and rose in the gurdwara where, by 2023, he was president.

He was walking a road Punjabis had walked for more than a century. Canada’s first gurdwara opened in Vancouver in 1908, and in 1914 the Komagata Maru, carrying 376 people from Punjab, was turned away from the same harbour. By 2021 Canada counted about 770,000 Sikhs, a little over two per cent of its people, more than in any country outside India. Surrey is their heartland.

Nijjar was also political. He led the Canadian arm of Sikhs for Justice, a US-based group, circulated petitions asking the UN to call the 1984 killings of Sikhs a genocide, and in his last months was organising votes in an unofficial ‘Khalistan referendum’ for a Sikh homeland carved out of Punjab. The vote had no legal force. To India it was a provocation; to his supporters it was free speech.

In Punjab, police files told a different story. Interpol red notices, issued at India’s request in 2014 and 2016, called him a leader of the Khalistan Tiger Force, an armed group. India linked him to the 2007 bombing of the Shingar cinema in Ludhiana and, later, to targeted killings. In 2016 a Surrey man arrested in Punjab told police that Nijjar had sent him to attack the leaders of religious sects.

In 2018 Punjab’s Chief Minister, Amarinder Singh, handed Trudeau a list of ‘most wanted’ men in Canada; Nijjar was on it. In 2020 India’s Home Ministry designated him a terrorist under its anti-terror law, the UAPA. In 2022 the National Investigation Agency offered a reward of ₹10 lakh for information leading to his arrest, accusing him of a plot to kill a Hindu priest in Punjab.

Nijjar denied every word. In 2016 he wrote to Trudeau that the accusations were invented to silence him.

Fabricated, baseless, fictitious and politically motivated.Hardeep Singh Nijjar, letter to Justin Trudeau, 2016

Canada never charged him. He was put on its no-fly list in 2016 and questioned in 2018, then released within a day. A Globe and Mail investigation in 2024 found that India had not given compelling evidence for its claims, and that some of them rested on statements from people in Indian custody, which critics say may have been extracted by torture. The same paper reported unnamed sources saying Nijjar had led weapons training near Vancouver around 2015. No court has ever tested any of it.

His supporters remember a different man. The World Sikh Organization of Canada said he often led peaceful protests over human rights in India. His son said that in the weeks before the shooting, officers of CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, were meeting his father once or twice a week and had warned him his life was in danger.

The gurdwara’s security camera caught the killing in about 90 seconds of footage. In September 2023 The Washington Post, which reviewed the video and spoke to witnesses, described a planned attack: at least six men and two cars, and at least 50 shots fired. Investigators believed the gunmen had waited for him for an hour or more.

Witnesses told the Post that police took 12 to 20 minutes to arrive, and that officers argued over jurisdiction, while gurdwara members ran after the gunmen themselves. The gurdwara said the video was never meant to be public and opened an inquiry into how the paper had seen it.

For three months, the investigation was quiet. In the community, it was not. Weeks after the killing, posters for a rally in Canada named India’s High Commissioner and its consul general in Toronto, and blamed them for Nijjar’s death. India protested; Canada’s foreign minister condemned the posters. The stage was set.

New Delhi, 10 September 2023. The G20 summit was ending at Bharat Mandapam, and Justin Trudeau met Narendra Modi. Trudeau raised Nijjar. India’s account of the meeting said Modi raised something else: the activities of extremists in Canada, as India saw them. The two leaders left with nothing agreed, and Trudeau’s plane broke down, keeping him in Delhi for two extra days.

On the afternoon of 18 September, Trudeau rose in the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of IndiaJustin Trudeau, House of Commons, 18 September 2023

Any foreign hand in killing a Canadian on Canadian soil, he said, was an unacceptable violation of Canada’s sovereignty. His foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, expelled Pavan Kumar Rai, whom Canada described as the head of Indian intelligence in the country.

India answered the next morning. Its foreign ministry rejected the allegations as ‘absurd and motivated’, said Trudeau had made the same charge to Modi in Delhi and been turned down, and said such claims were meant to shift attention from the people India calls Khalistani terrorists and extremists sheltering in Canada. It expelled Olivier Sylvestre, the Canadian intelligence chief in Delhi.

On 21 September 2023, India stopped issuing visas to Canadians, citing threats to its staff. Then it demanded ‘parity’: Canada had far more diplomats in India than India had in Canada. On 19 October Canada pulled out 41 diplomats rather than see them stripped of immunity. Visa services came back in stages from late October.

Canada had told its allies before it spoke. The US ambassador in Ottawa, David Cohen, confirmed that intelligence shared among the Five Eyes, the spy alliance of the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, had informed Trudeau. Washington said it was deeply concerned, but kept close to Delhi.

In November 2023 the story jumped the border. US prosecutors charged an Indian man, Nikhil Gupta, over a plot to murder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the New York lawyer who leads Sikhs for Justice, and said an Indian government employee had directed it. The indictment alleged that within hours of Nijjar’s killing, that employee sent Gupta a video clip of Nijjar’s body slumped in his truck. India set up an inquiry and said such plots were against its policy; Gupta pleaded guilty in New York in February 2026.

Edmonton, Friday, 3 May 2024. Police officers arrested three young Indian nationals: Karan Brar, 22, Kamalpreet Singh, 22, and Karanpreet Singh, 28. All three had come to Canada on temporary visas in the previous few years. On 11 May a fourth man, Amandeep Singh, 22, was charged; he was already in custody in Ontario on unrelated firearms charges.

Each of the four is accused of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. None has been tried, and each is presumed innocent. Indian and Canadian media reported, citing unnamed sources, that the men had links to Lawrence Bishnoi’s gang. Police said their work went further than the men in custody.

These efforts include investigating connections to the government of India.RCMP Assistant Commissioner David Teboul, 3 May 2024

In India, Jaishankar said the men appeared to have a gang background and that India would wait for Canada’s police to share what they had. In May 2024, Sikh protesters gathered outside the Surrey courthouse as the four made their first appearance together. The Crown later sent the case straight to the Supreme Court of British Columbia by direct indictment, skipping a preliminary hearing. A publication ban covers parts of the pre-trial hearings.

18 June 2024, Ottawa. On the first anniversary, Speaker Greg Fergus told the House of Commons that the parties had agreed to stand in silence for Nijjar, ‘assassinated in Surrey, one year ago today’. MPs rose.

India’s consulate in Vancouver answered within hours. It called a memorial for 23 June in Stanley Park for the 329 people killed when Air India Flight 182, the ‘Kanishka’, was bombed in 1985 by a suitcase checked in at Vancouver. It was, and is, the worst terror attack in Canada’s history, and India has never forgotten that only one man was convicted for it.

The message was clear. Canada saw a citizen murdered by a foreign state. India saw a country that had sheltered armed Khalistan campaigners for four decades. On the same day, protesters outside India’s consulate carried posters of Talwinder Singh Parmar, whom Canadian investigators came to regard as the mastermind of the 1985 bombing, a reminder of why Indians find Canada’s indignation hard to hear.

Monday, 14 October 2024. RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme called a press conference on a public holiday. He said Indian diplomats and consular officials had gathered information on Sikh Canadians and passed it on, and that it was used by criminal networks to intimidate, extort and kill. Police had issued warnings over more than a dozen credible threats to life.

Canada’s chargé d’affaires in Delhi, Stewart Wheeler, said Canada had ‘credible, irrefutable evidence’. That weekend, Canadian officials had told India that its High Commissioner, Sanjay Kumar Verma, and other diplomats were persons of interest in the Nijjar case, and asked India to waive their immunity. India refused. Canada expelled Verma and five others; India said it was withdrawing them, and expelled six Canadian diplomats, including the acting High Commissioner.

India’s statement that day was the angriest yet.

The Government of India strongly rejects these preposterous imputations.India’s Ministry of External Affairs, 14 October 2024

It said Canada had not shared a shred of evidence since 2023, and accused Trudeau of a political agenda centred on vote bank politics, citing his troubled 2018 visit to India and his comments on the farmers’ protest in 2020. Verma, it said, was a diplomat with 36 years’ service.

Two days later, at a public inquiry into foreign interference, Trudeau admitted something India seized on. When he spoke in September 2023, he said, Canada had ‘primarily intelligence and not hard evidentiary proof’. India’s ministry said this proved Canada had presented no evidence whatsoever. On 29 October, Canada’s deputy foreign minister, David Morrison, told MPs he had confirmed to The Washington Post that Home Minister Amit Shah was the senior official behind the campaign. India protested the ‘absurd and baseless references’ to Shah.

There were limits on both sides. In November 2024, Canada’s government said it had no evidence linking Modi, Jaishankar or national security adviser Ajit Doval to the crimes. And in Canada the anger was spilling into the streets: on 3 November 2024, a protest by Khalistan supporters at the Hindu Sabha Mandir in Brampton turned violent. Trudeau called it unacceptable, and Modi condemned what he called a deliberate attack on a Hindu temple.

For Sikh Canadians, the Nijjar case was never just diplomacy. Many had fled Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s, and they heard in Trudeau’s words something they had long said: that the long arm of the Indian state reached into Canada. Sikh groups said the warnings police were now issuing proved them right. Jagmeet Singh, the Sikh leader of the New Democratic Party, said that he too was later warned by police and given protection.

Not every Sikh Canadian supports Khalistan; most do not campaign for it at all. But many who do not still say the right to argue for it peacefully is part of being Canadian, and that India uses the word ‘terrorist’ to cover dissent. India’s rejoinder is that Canada has tolerated men who praise the killers of Indira Gandhi and the bombers of Flight 182.

Hindu Canadians, and many Indian students and workers, felt caught in the middle. In September 2023 a video by Sikhs for Justice told Indian Hindus to leave Canada; Canadian ministers called it hateful. Temples were defaced. After Brampton, Hindu groups said they no longer felt safe at prayer.

In March 2025 Trudeau was gone, and Mark Carney, a former central banker, was Prime Minister. With Donald Trump’s tariffs biting, Canada needed new markets, and India was the biggest. Carney invited Modi to the G7 summit at Kananaskis in the Rockies. The World Sikh Organization’s Balpreet Singh called the invitation a ‘betrayal of Canadian values’. Carney defended it, saying the legal process in the Nijjar case would go on.

Modi and Carney met there in June 2025, almost two years to the day after the killing, and agreed to send their high commissioners back. The next day CSIS published its annual report. It named India among the main foreign states interfering in Canada and called the killing an escalation, showing India’s clear intent to target individuals in North America. It also said a small number of Canada-based Khalistani extremists were planning and funding violence in India. India rejected the first part and pointed to the second.

Real and perceived Khalistani extremism emerging from Canada continues to drive Indian foreign interferenceCSIS public report, June 2025

On 28 August 2025 the two countries named new envoys: Dinesh K. Patnaik for India and Christopher Cooter for Canada. In September Canada listed the Bishnoi gang as a terrorist entity, without mentioning India. On 27 February 2026 Carney landed in New Delhi; days before, an unnamed Canadian official had told reporters that India was ‘no longer a threat’. In Delhi the two sides signed a long-term uranium deal and set themselves the end of 2026 to finish a trade agreement.

In Surrey, the reset felt different. Days before Carney flew, police warned Moninder Singh, Nijjar’s close associate, that his life and those of his wife and two children were at risk. He called it ‘a bit alarming’ and said he suspected India. Foreign Minister Anita Anand said no country would ever get ‘a pass’ on Canadians’ safety.

Lawrence Bishnoi has been in Indian jails for years, and his name has followed one killing after another, among them that of the singer Sidhu Moose Wala in Mansa in 2022, in which Punjab police named his gang. On 7 July 2026, US prosecutors in California unsealed a racketeering indictment against him and Satinderjeet Singh, known as Goldy Brar, who is still at large.

It accuses the two men of ordering Nijjar’s assassination. It says Bishnoi gave a co-conspirator a photograph of Nijjar and several addresses, and that two men shot him as he left the gurdwara. The indictment does not allege any role for the Indian government, and US officials did not mention one. The RCMP’s Lisa Moreland said nothing had come out that day to link the Indian government.

An Indian official told The Wire that India’s view had always been that Nijjar died in ‘an action between criminal gangs’. Sikh groups answered that a gang can be hired, which is what the RCMP alleged in 2024. Both readings fit the indictment. Only a trial can choose between them.

More than three years after the shots in the car park, nobody has been convicted of killing Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Prosecutors said in 2025 that the four accused remained in custody. In February 2026 Canadian prosecutors said the trial was unlikely to start before August 2026, and in the reports we could find no trial had begun. Canada has never made public the intelligence behind Trudeau’s words, and India still denies any role.

The Pannun case in New York has gone furthest: a guilty plea by Nikhil Gupta. In Canada, the questions that started it all are still open: who chose Nijjar, who paid, and whether anyone in an Indian office knew.

A man was shot dead in a gurdwara car park on Father’s Day. That much no one disputes. India says he was a terrorist; he said he was an activist; no court ever ruled on either. Canada says India’s agents were linked to his killing; India says Canada has never shown proof. Four young men from Punjab are accused of murder and are entitled to be presumed innocent until a jury decides.

What the record does show is uncomfortable for everyone. India’s accusations against Nijjar were never tested in court, and its record on dissent abroad is now the subject of a guilty plea in New York. Canada made a grave charge without making its evidence public, and for decades let the memory of Flight 182 sit beside posters of the men India blames for it. And Sikh Canadians who live with police warnings watched two governments shake hands over uranium. The truth may come out in a courtroom in British Columbia. Until it does, every side’s strongest case is set out above for you to judge.