US says Indian government worker led plot to kill US citizen

U.S. prosecutors accused an Indian government employee of directing a foiled plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist with U.S. citizenship in New York, in a case that has disrupted U.S.-India relations and mirrors a 2023 killing in Canada.

Vikash Yadav, 39, was added to the criminal case against Nikhil Gupta, 53. Gupta was charged last year with working with an Indian government agent to kill an attorney described as active in the global movement to carve an independent Sikh homeland out of India.

Yadav “resided in India, and directed the assassination plot from India,” according to a superseding indictment filed in the case Thursday. Gupta, who is being held without bail, pleaded not guilty to the new indictment before U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero on Friday.

Gupta, who was arrested in the Czech Republic and extradited to the U.S., was allegedly recruited by an Indian government employee who described himself as a “senior field officer” with responsibilities in “security management” and “intelligence.” That government official, who wasn’t named in the original charges against Gupta, was identified as Yadav in Thursday’s indictment.

The case has been awkward for President Joe Biden’s administration, which has continued to court New Delhi in an effort to counterbalance China.

Prosecutors said Yadav is employed by the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India, which is home to the nation’s foreign intelligence service. Yadav isn’t in custody, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a release announcing the unsealing of charges against Yadav, who allegedly goes by the alias “Amanat.”

Yadav and Gupta are charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Gupta’s attorney, Jeffrey Chabrowe, told the judge Friday that while the government has provided “voluminous” evidence to the defense team, his client has not been able to review some of it, including recordings, while in custody in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Gupta is also trying to access certain items that were seized when he was taken into custody in Czechoslovakia — including a copy of the novel “The Alchemist” and personal papers and notebooks. Prosecutors said they handed the items over to a team to review them for potential attorney-client privilege.

Chabrowe told Marrero that Gupta wants a new lawyer, preferably one who speaks Hindi.

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the attorney who was the alleged target of the murder plot, applauded the charges against Yadav.

The attempt on his life is 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,” Pannun said in a statement.

India has branded him a terrorist and outlawed his group, which advocates for an independent Sikh homeland to be created out of India’s Punjab state, calling it a threat to India’s territorial integrity. A group of more than a dozen Sikhs attended Friday’s court hearing, seated in the gallery directly behind Gupta.

The charges come after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week accused Indian diplomats of backing a pattern of criminal harassment and violence against Canadians, escalating a dispute that began last year when he suggested Indian agents were involved in the murder of a Canadian Sikh activist in British Columbia.

Canada expelled six officials on Monday after saying that India had refused to waive their diplomatic immunity for questioning over what Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly called “a number of violent incidents” targeting Canada’s South Asian community, particularly Sikhs.

After U.S. prosecutors first made the allegations against Gupta, the Indian government formed a committee to look into the issue. That team visited the U.S. this week and held meetings at the State Department in Washington.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday that the visiting delegation told U.S. officials that the Indian government employee named in the original indictment “is no longer an employee of the Indian government.”

(Laura Dhillon Kane and Chris Dolmetsch contributed this report.)