The murder-for-hire trial of a man accused of planning assassinations for the Indian government in New York has been delayed.
The trial of alleged drugs-and-arms smuggler Nikhil (Nick) Gupta was due to start on Monday in New York City.
Gupta is charged with conspiring with officials in the Indian government and its overseas intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), to murder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun — a Sikh independence activist and U.S.-Canadian citizen whom Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has declared a terrorist.
Pre-trial motions filed by prosecutors in the case show that they plan to air new evidence, including wiretaps and video, about the killing of Pannun’s Canadian deputy, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in Surrey, B.C., in 2023.
By reviving the controversy around India’s involvement in the Nijjar killing and presenting new evidence implicating Indian officials, the trial has the potential to complicate efforts by both the Indian and Canadian governments to put the Nijjar dispute behind them and re-establish normal diplomatic relations.
Gupta seeks to represent himself
Gupta asked for the delay. He had complained about the public defender assigned to him by the court and has been demanding to represent himself at trial.
In a pre-trial motion filed with Senior U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, Gupta claimed that his court-appointed lawyer, Matthew Laroche, had discussed the case with an assistant U.S. attorney and that “counsel’s comments suggested that he was disinclined to vigorously defend this case following that conversation.”
Gupta also accused the lawyer of “unprofessional, fraudulent, and deceptive conduct,” which he said included failing to file a motion on Gupta’s behalf to dismiss charges and then falsely telling Gupta that the judge had declined to accept it.
The judge accepted Gupta’s motion and delayed the trial. There will now be a pre-trial conference on Nov. 14 to set a new date.
Gupta has been assigned a new public defender, New York lawyer David Touger, although he continues to say that he wants to represent himself.
Nijjar a presence at the trial
Although Gupta is not accused directly in the plot to assassinate Hardeep Singh Nijjar, U.S. prosecutors have already filed documents making it clear that they intend to explore at length the connections between the alleged Pannun plot and the B.C. group that killed Nijjar in the parking lot of a Surrey gurdwara.
The person alleged to be the nexus between those killings is unindicted co-conspirator Vikash Yadav, who at the time was an agent of R&AW based in India. Yadav has since been removed from his job at R&AW, according to Indian media reports, but is not expected to face trial in the United States.
The New York court filing alleges that in addition to Pannun and Nijjar, conspirators also targeted a third individual in Nepal or Pakistan, a plot “so strikingly similar to the plot to murder [Pannun] as to constitute a modus operandi” under the law.
U.S. prosecutors detailed their intention to present at trial wiretapped conversations between Gupta and a man who he believed would help with the assassination but who was actually a confidential informant who had tipped off federal authorities to the conspiracy. They are also expected to present recordings of conversations between Gupta and an undercover federal agent who Gupta believed was a killer-for-hire.
The Modi government has acknowledged that Yadav played a role in the conspiracy but not that it went higher in the Indian government. Instead, it has described Yadav as a rogue actor. India has denied any involvement in the Nijjar killing. Evidence expected to be presented at trial will almost certainly undermine efforts by India to keep the two cases separate.
Federal authorities say they have wiretap evidence of Gupta showing a fresh video of Nijjar’s killing to the purported hit man just hours after it was carried out and encouraging him to get to work on tracking and killing his target in New York, Pannun.
