India, gangs - or both? Why Sikhs in Canada are being murdered

Less than half an hour after the prominent Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead outside a temple in British Columbia, Moninder Singh addressed a crowd near the site of the brazen attack.

- Leyland Cecco, Ahmar Khan, Hannah Ellis-Petersen

"Make no mistake: this is a political assassination," Singh told the agitated crowd in June 2023.

"And it's been carried out by India." Reaction from Delhi, about 7,000 miles away, was starkly different. The government had long considered Nijjar a terrorist and Indian media wrote off the killing as a "fratricidal gang-world slaughter".

In the months since, the two narratives of an India-ordered assassination and an underworld hit - appeared at odds. But the recent arrest of three men for their alleged involvement in the killing of Nijjar has suggested that there is an element of truth to both of those claims. A fourth man, already in custody in the province of Ontario on firearms offences, was charged on Sunday.

The men are allegedly linked to a sprawling criminal network with operations in Canada. And with more arrests expected, investigators and government officials remain confident India's government used a tactic they claim it has employed before: using contract killers from a local gang to carry out a political assassination.

Charges against Karanpreet Singh, Kamalpreet Singh, Karan Brar and Amandeep Singh have done little to calm a lingering sense of fear within the Sikh community.