Indian citizen Nikhil Gupta on Friday pleaded guilty in a plot to assassinate a Khalistani separatist in New York in a case United States officials allege is linked to an Indian government employee.
Gupta, 54, pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit money laundering before US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in a Manhattan federal court. The charges carry a maximum combined sentence of 40 years in prison.
In 2023, the United States Department of Justice accused Gupta of conspiring with an Indian government official to kill Khalistani separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
Pannun, an American and Canadian citizen, is an advocate for Khalistan, an independent state for Sikhs. He is the general counsel of an organisation called Sikhs for Justice, which was banned in India in 2019. Pannun was declared an “individual terrorist” in India under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in 2020.
The US charges came months after the Canadian government alleged the involvement of Indian government agents in the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar near Vancouver in June 2023.
On Friday, after the hearing, Federal Bureau of Investigation Assistant Director in Charge James C Barnacle Junior said that Gupta had facilitated “a foreign adversary’s unlawful effort to silence a vocal critic of the Indian government”.
Barnacle claimed that Gupta had done so “at the direction and coordination of an Indian government employee, Nikhil Gupta plotted to assassinate a United States citizen on American soil”.
In October 2024, the US charged a man named Vikash Yadav with murder-for-hire and money laundering in connection with the matter.
In a statement on Saturday, US officials said that Yadav “at relevant times” was “employed by the government of India’s Cabinet Secretariat, which houses India’s foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing”.
Gupta had at the time denied having links to Yadav and told The Indian Express that the evidence presented by the US was “fabricated”.
New Delhi has denied involvement in the alleged plot to assassinate Khalistani separatists. However, it had said that it constituted a high-level committee to examine the inputs provided by the United States.
There was no immediate comment from the Indian government on Gupta’s guilty plea.
Gupta was extradited to the US on June 14. The Czech authorities had arrested him on June 30, 2023, at the request of the United States when he travelled from India to the Czech capital Prague.
US prosecutors have alleged Gupta paid $100,000 in cash to a hitman to assassinate Pannun. The hitman turned out to be an undercover United States federal agent.
The plot was part of a larger conspiracy to kill one person in California and at least three in Canada, the US justice department has alleged.
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