Chandigarh: The National Investigating Team (NIA) raided the homes of relatives and aides of Member of Parliament and Sikh radical Amritpal Singh, who is being held in Dibrugarh Jail under the National Security Act in connection with a terrorist and crime network.
The raids were also linked to a 2023 event in which pro-Khalistan protesters demonstrated outside India’s High Commission in Ottawa, as well as an attack on the Indian High Commission in London.
The NIA raid took place in numerous locations in Amritsar, including his uncle Pragat Singh Sandhu’s house and workshop and his brother-in-law Amanjot Singh’s household. Amanjot is currently residing in Canada.
Raids were carried out simultaneously in Moga, Gurdaspur, and Jalandhar districts.
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Charanjit Singh Bhinder, an Amritpal supporter, described the raids as pressure tactics used to harass the MP’s followers.
Amritpal Singh, a thirty-one-year-old extremist currently imprisoned in Assam, won the Khadoor Sahib seat in the parliamentary elections.
After a 36-day cat-and-mouse hunt spanning multiple states, he was apprehended in April 2023 in the village where slain terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale lived. He remained relatively unknown until September 2022, when he returned to India from Dubai, where he controlled his family’s transport business.
Amritpal was attempting to position himself as a new fulcrum for the Panthic cause by calling on the youth to “fight for the freedom” of the Panth after taking over ‘Waris Punjab De’—or “the heirs of Punjab”—established by lawyer-actor-turned-activist Deep Sidhu in 2021.
Sidhu, one of the suspects in the January 26, 2021, Red Fort violence case, died in a car crash near Sonepat, Haryana, in February 2022.
In September that year, Amritpal Singh was officially installed as the head of ‘Waris Punjab De’ with a ‘dastar bandi’ (turban-tying) ceremony at Rode village.
However, unlike Bhindranwale, he did not have any official religious education. He was a polytechnic dropout who had shaved his beard and trimmed (his) hair while he lived in Dubai.
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–IANS
