Aman Aman and Digvijay Digvijay, both 21 years old, were arrested by Peel Regional Police in May.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Two young men living in a Vancouver suburb have been charged in connection with the daytime killing of a trucking insurance broker outside his Mississauga, Ont., office last month.
But his family still wants to see more charges laid in the slaying of a man once targeted in a wave of extortions that has rattled Sikh people across Canada.
Peel Regional Police announced this week that Aman Aman and Digvijay Digvijay, both 21 years old, were arrested last Wednesday in Delta, B.C., with the help of partners at different departments in and around that city. Delta police confirmed that the region’s Emergency Response Team, the Canadian equivalent of a SWAT team, was deployed to arrest the pair at a local home.
Peel police said the two young men are from Delta, with that city’s police force saying it did not have any open cases related to either them or their residence.
The pair were then flown back to Ontario and attended a bail hearing on Sunday, Peel police said.
They face first-degree murder charges for the May 14 shooting death of Harjeet Singh Dhadda in the parking lot of his Mississauga office, near Toronto Pearson International Airport.
That’s not enough, according to Gurlin Dhadda, who said she believes her father’s killing was orchestrated by the same people who attempted unsuccessfully to extort him in recent years.
“All I need for them is to just find out who was behind this,” she said in an interview on Wednesday.
She said her father was first threatened in April, 2023, when a man approached him at his office. The man said he was hired to kill Mr. Dhadda but could not go through with it, instead asking for money. Mr. Dhadda jumped in his car and fled for home, she said, then contacted the Peel police, who arrested a suspect days later.
Then, she said, on Dec. 10, 2023, he received a call from someone demanding he pay them $500,000 or he would be killed. He refused that extortion, reported it to police and was put up in a hotel briefly for his own safety, Ms. Dhadda added.
After a month of working from home, he returned to his office in January of last year, she said, but with a renewed sense of vigilance and strategies to protect himself from further attacks, such as always commuting by different routes.
Ms. Dhadda said her father visited the Punjab and his home state of Uttarakhand three years ago for several weeks. His social-media feed often included strident criticism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populist government. But Ms. Dhadda said she does not believe his killing has any connection to that country.
Still, when she saw Indian media outlets reporting that an associate of the infamous Indian gang leader Lawrence Bishnoi had claimed responsibility for her father’s killing, she forwarded the articles to police.
In recent years, extortion threats have been reported in Edmonton, the Greater Toronto Area and several B.C. cities, including West Vancouver, White Rock, Abbotsford and Surrey, through physical letters and phone calls and over social-media apps.
In late 2023, a “Law Enforcement Only” bulletin sent to police agencies in B.C. that leaked online said investigators in the city of Abbotsford believed the suspects in an extortion case that involved shootings and arson were tied to the Bishnoi group.
In February of last year, the RCMP established a national team to help co-ordinate municipal police investigations in B.C., Alberta and Ontario and share information about these extortion rings.
Last fall, the RCMP kicked off a diplomatic row when it alleged that Indian diplomats shared intelligence with the Bishnoi group about Canadians who were advocating for a separate Sikh homeland.
Assistant Commissioner Brigitte Gauvin said during a press conference at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa last October that organized crime has worked with Indian government agents, which she said has been “publicly attributed and claimed by one organized-crime group in particular, which is the Bishnoi group.”