An Indian national admitted to his role in a foiled 2023 criminal plot to kill a Sikh activist with US citizenship who was living in New York. Nikhil Gupta, 54, pleaded guilty at a federal court hearing in New York Friday to three charges linked to a plan to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an activist who publicly supported establishing a Sikh state in Punjab, the state in northern India where most of the adherents to the religion live.
Gupta was arrested in June 2023 in the Czech Republic and extradited to the US. By pleading guilty, he avoids trial in a case that inflamed tensions in India's relationships with the US and Canada.
Prosecutors claimed Gupta was part of a group working with the Indian government to target Sikh separatists overseas, including the deadly June 2023 shooting of Hardeep Singh Nijjar by masked gunmen outside a Sikh temple in Western Canada. In the New York case, the US said Gupta hired an assassin to kill Pannun, on the orders of Vikash Yadav, an officer with India's external intelligence agency who is also charged in the case.
Gupta has been held without bail since his arrival in the US. He faces decades in prison. Yadav remains in India.
Yadav “directed the assassination plot from India,” according to charges filed in the case. Gupta was allegedly recruited by Yadav, who worked for the Cabinet Secretariat of India's government, home to the nation's foreign intelligence service.
Yadav and Gupta were both charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
If Gupta had gone to trial, prosecutors would have proved their case with texts and phone messages, and the testimony of an undercover agent, posing as a hitman, who received a $15,000 payment, court heard Friday.
“In the spring of 2023, I agreed, with another individual person, to murder a person in the United States,” Gupta told Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn, reading from a statement.
“You paid somebody $15,000 to do this?” she asked.
“Yes,” Gupta replied.
Pannun, who is also a Canadian citizen, called the attempt to kill him a “blatant case of India's transnational terrorism which has become a challenge to America's sovereignty and threat to freedom of speech and democracy” in a statement at the time of the charges against Gupta and Yadav.
India has claimed Pannun is a terrorist and outlawed his group, which advocates for an independent Sikh homeland, calling it a threat to India's territorial integrity. Gupta's court appearances have been regularly attended by a group of Sikh men who sit together in the gallery behind Gupta.
The allegations that surfaced in 2023 complicated the Biden administration's push to court India as a counter-weight to China. Under Donald Trump, US relations with India have also been fractious at times, though the countries recently reached a deal to ease tariff tensions.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to visit India in the coming weeks as he seeks to move past the diplomatic crisis sparked by Nijjar's killing. Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of orchestrating the murder — a charge Narendra Modi's government dismissed as “absurd.”
The US later unsealed its indictment against Gupta that contained similar allegations and said he texted plans to accelerate Pannun's murder after Nijjar's killing. It also said he forwarded a video of the Canadian activist's body to the man he believed was a hitman.
Canadian police later broadened the country's accusations against India, saying officials from the South Asian country were involved in plots involving violence, intimidation and extortion targeting Sikh activists in Canada. Four Indian nationals are still awaiting trial in British Columbia in connection with Nijjar's killing.
But Carney, driven by Trump's tariffs on Canadian goods, has brought a more pragmatic, trade-driven foreign policy than his predecessor. Since last year, Canada and India have restored diplomatic ties and restarted trade negotiations.
India has continued to deny Canada's allegation about Nijjar, but conducted an internal investigation into the US claim and concluded the alleged plot was carried out by rogue Indian agents, Bloomberg News has reported.
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