The Bishnoi Gang in Canada
In September 2025 Canada did something it had never done to an India-based criminal organization: it listed the Bishnoi gang as a terrorist entity. Public Safety Canada describes a group that “generates terror through extortion and intimidation” in Canadian diaspora communities — directed, prosecutors in California now allege, from a prison cell in Gujarat.
The Bishnoi gang is an India-based transnational criminal organization that Canadian authorities say has established an operational presence in this country — not as a transplanted branch, but as a demand signal transmitted from India to men already living here. That activity, on the account of police and federal agencies, is concentrated in the extortion of South Asian business owners, enforced by gunfire at storefronts and homes. It has drawn a response no other India-based criminal network in Canada has faced: a terrorist listing under the Criminal Code.
This profile sets out what is established, what is alleged, and — because the two are constantly conflated in coverage of this file — what is neither.
The Terrorist Listing
On 28 September 2025, the Governor in Council made Order in Council P.C. 2025-695, registered as SOR/2025-201, adding the Bishnoi gang to Canada’s list of terrorist entities under subsection 83.05(1) of the Criminal Code. The listing was announced publicly the following day by Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree. The order names the group as “Bishnoi Gang (also known among other names as Lawrence Bishnoi Gang, Bishnoi Group, Lawrence Bishnoi Group and Bishnoi Crime Group).”
“The Bishnoi Gang is a transnational criminal organization operating primarily out of India. They have a presence in Canada and are active in areas with significant diaspora communities. The Bishnoi Gang engages in murder, shootings and arson, and generates terror through extortion and intimidation. They create a climate of insecurity in these communities by targeting them, their prominent community members, businesses, and cultural figures.”
— Public Safety Canada, 29 September 2025
The practical effect of a listing is financial and administrative rather than a new criminal offence aimed at the group. It becomes an offence to deal in property owned or controlled by the entity, or to provide it with property or financial services. Assets can be frozen and seized. The listing also supports terrorism-related investigative powers and strengthens immigration and border enforcement tools against people found to be members.
The Bishnoi listing is frequently described as the first time Canada listed a criminal gang as a terrorist entity. It was not. On 19 February 2025, seven months earlier, Canada listed seven transnational criminal organizations at once under SOR/2025-31 (announced 20 February 2025; published in the Canada Gazette the following month): the Sinaloa Cartel, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Gulf Cartel, Cárteles Unidos, La Familia Michoacana, MS-13 and Tren de Aragua.
What appears to be accurate — though the government has not itself characterised it this way — is that the Bishnoi gang is the first India-based criminal organization listed as a terrorist entity in Canada, and the first listed primarily in response to violence directed at a Canadian diaspora community.
Leadership
Born 12 February 1993. In custody in India since 2015, currently held at Sabarmati prison in Gujarat.
Bishnoi faces more than thirty cases in India, nineteen of them currently being tried. He has been convicted in four — none of them for murder. He is named as an accused in the May 2022 killing of the Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala.
The United States indictments unsealed in July 2026 allege that he ran the organization from inside prison. The allegation, as the Department of Justice put it in announcing the charges, is that “using contraband cellphones and other voice-over internet protocol devices smuggled into his jail cell, Bishnoi personally directed political assassinations, murders, shootings, extortions, kidnappings, drug trafficking, human smuggling, and other crimes committed by members and associates of the Bishnoi enterprise worldwide.” None of it has been tested in court.
Status: In Indian custody. Charged in absentia in the United States. Fugitive from US process.
Age 32. Designated a terrorist by India under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Whereabouts unknown. His Canadian immigration history, set out below, is documented in government records.
Brar arrived in Canada in 2017 on a student visa to attend Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. He filed a refugee claim in February 2019. He failed to appear at his hearing on 14 June 2022, and the Refugee Protection Division deemed the claim abandoned. He was added to Canada’s most-wanted list on 2 May 2023 and quietly removed when the list was next updated, on 23 April 2024.
Reports that Brar was killed in a shootout in Fresno, California on 30 April 2024 were false. US police confirmed the man killed was not Brar, and he is charged as a living fugitive in the July 2026 US indictment.
Status: Fugitive.
Lawrence Bishnoi’s brother. Deported from the United States and arrested by India’s National Investigation Agency on 19 November 2025, then remanded into NIA custody. He is accused in India in the October 2024 murder of Baba Siddique, the April 2024 shooting at Salman Khan’s residence, and the Moose Wala killing.
No Canadian proceedings against him are known.
How the Network Operates
Indian federal investigators estimate the organization at roughly 700 members across Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi; Punjab police track something on the order of 2,500 associated hideouts. But headcount is the wrong measure of the Canadian problem. What crosses the ocean is not a membership roll — it is a name, a demand, and a payment.
The model that emerges from Canadian, American and Indian documents is a contractor structure. Direction originates in India, transmitted over encrypted applications. Execution is local. The people who fire the shots at a Surrey storefront or a Brampton restaurant are not imported operatives; they are men already in Canada, recruited cheaply, often with no prior relationship to the organization beyond the job in front of them.
A classified Canada Border Services Agency tactical guide titled “The Bishnoi Gang: An Emerging Threat in Canada”, circulated internally in December 2025 and reported by Global News in August 2026, records that “investigations increasingly identify Indian foreign nationals on study permits and work permits as participants in these organized criminal activities.”
The financial picture comes from elsewhere. One man told a deportation hearing that a colleague had offered him $4,000 to accompany him to Vancouver Island for a single shooting. That is testimony about one offer for one job — not an established rate, and not a finding in the CBSA document.
Goldy Brar’s own route into Canada — a 2017 student visa, an abandoned refugee claim — is the same pathway described in the document, years earlier.
The Canadian Operational Layer
British Columbia’s Lower Mainland is the centre of gravity. The Surrey Police Service recorded 48 extortion-related reports by 22 September 2025, 133 across the whole of 2025, and 138 in 2026 to 24 August — overwhelmingly targeting South Asian individuals and businesses. The reported volume has not fallen since the terrorist listing. It has risen. The pattern is consistent: a demand arrives, it is refused or ignored, and a house or a storefront is shot at.
On 13 August 2025, a letter attributed to the Bishnoi gang was delivered to the Abbotsford Police Department. It claimed the organization had “upwards of 1,000 individuals that are willing to carry out these shootings” and that “every business needs to pay their tax.”
Abbotsford Police confirmed receiving the letter and said its contents were shared with law enforcement partners. Police have not publicly authenticated it as genuinely originating from the gang, and declined to discuss what investigative steps were taken. Read it as a claim made in the gang’s name, not as an established capability.
On 17 September 2025, British Columbia launched a dedicated Extortion Task Force — forty members drawn from the BC RCMP as lead agency, Abbotsford Police, CFSEU-BC, Delta Police, Metro Vancouver Transit Police, the Surrey Police Service, the CBSA and the RCMP’s National Co-ordination and Support Team, funded with $200,000 from the federal Gun and Gang Violence Action Fund.
- 32 files taken under the task force’s conduct across Lower Mainland jurisdictions
- 7 individuals criminally charged
- Nearly 100 judicial authorizations obtained
- Over 1,000 physical exhibits collected
- 111 foreign nationals under CBSA investigation, 9 removed from Canada
Note: the RCMP releases announcing these results do not name the Bishnoi gang. The task force targets extortion in the Lower Mainland generally.
Operation Hard Ball
On 7 July 2026, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California announced the results of a coordinated international operation in which the RCMP was a partner. Three indictments, returned between 23 June and 1 July 2026, charged 37 defendants. Twenty-four were arrested — eleven in California, one in Indiana, one in Georgia, one in Spain, seven already in custody, and three in Canada.
Four British Columbia men appear across the three indictments — three arrested in Canada that week, and one arrested in France days later.
Ravinder Singh Dhanda, 57, Vancouver | Alleged head of a cocaine and methamphetamine network. Charged with drug distribution and export conspiracy, continuing criminal enterprise, and five counts of possession with intent. Faces a maximum of life. Arrested.
Jaskarn Baghri, 50, Surrey | Charged in the same eight-count Dhanda indictment: conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances, conspiracy to export controlled substances, and related counts. Arrested.
Garinder Deo, 40, Vancouver | Named in the Bhagwanpuria indictment as an alleged bulk cocaine and heroin purchaser. The Department of Justice states he is not charged as a member or associate of that group, but allegedly helped enrich it. He had not been arrested when the operation was announced on 7 July; he was arrested in France on or about 10 July 2026.
Gurtej Singh Smagh, 43, Creston | Charged in connection with obtaining border inspection information. Arrested.
All are presumed innocent. See our earlier reporting on the Deo arrest and the B.C. civil forfeiture action.
The Nijjar Allegation
This is the part of the file where precision matters most, and where coverage most often fails.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead outside the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey on 18 June 2023. Four men — Karan Brar, Karanpreet Singh, Amandeep Singh and Kamalpreet Singh — were arrested in May 2024 and charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The Crown proceeded by direct indictment on 18 November 2024, moving the case to the B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster.
The Canadian charges do not name Lawrence Bishnoi. The four accused in the Nijjar killing are charged in Canada with murder and conspiracy. Bishnoi is not a party to that prosecution.
The allegation that Bishnoi ordered the killing is American. The July 2026 US indictment states that Bishnoi and Goldy Brar “are charged with ordering this assassination, which occurred when two gunmen shot and killed H.S.N. as he left a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia on June 18, 2023.” The Department of Justice used initials only. Canadian reporting identified H.S.N. as Nijjar. This is a charge in an indictment. It has not been proven in any court.
The Indian-state allegation is separate again. On 14 October 2024 the RCMP publicly stated that investigators believe the gang is connected to agents of the Government of India. An internal RCMP assessment released under access-to-information in January 2026 describes the gang as “allegedly acting on behalf of the Indian government.” The US indictment contains no mention of the Indian government. India denies involvement. No court has made such a finding.
The four Nijjar accused were not released on bail. The B.C. Prosecution Service stated in January 2025: “It is not true that the four accused have been released on bail. All four accused were detained, and they continue to remain in custody.” The confusion arose from a stay entered in Provincial Court when the case moved up to the B.C. Supreme Court by direct indictment.
A purported audio recording of Goldy Brar claiming a role in the killing, circulated in August 2026, is unverified. The reporting that carried it stated that its authenticity and the claims in it “have not been independently verified.” It is not a confession.
As of August 2026 the Nijjar prosecution is in a pretrial phase under a publication ban. On 24 December 2025 the Attorney General filed an application in Federal Court under section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act to withhold information said to be injurious to international relations and national security. No trial date has been publicly confirmed.
What This Is Not
Two of the largest South Asian extortion takedowns in Canada are routinely folded into Bishnoi coverage. Neither is attributed to the Bishnoi gang by the police service that ran the investigation.
Peel Region, May 2026. Peel Regional Police charged 17 men with 106 offences in a takedown of the network police call “For Brothers.” The release does not mention Bishnoi. See our full profile of that network below.
Edmonton, Project Gaslight and Project Al Extortion. The Edmonton Police Service identified 56 suspects targeting South Asian businesses across Alberta, with links to British Columbia, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Neither project is attributed to Bishnoi in the available reporting.
There is real overlap in the ecosystem — FINTRAC’s April 2026 bulletin names both the Bishnoi and Bambiha gangs as primary actors in diaspora extortion, and notes that copycat operations also exist. But overlap is not attribution. Where police have not drawn the line, this publication does not draw it for them.
Immigration as an Enforcement Tool
Because much of the alleged street-level activity is carried out by people on temporary status, immigration proceedings have become a parallel enforcement track — with a much lower burden of proof than a criminal trial.
Jashandeep Singh, Edmonton | Ordered deported in July 2026. Described in reporting of the hearing as a bottom-tier soldier for the organization; arrived on a student visa in 2022. The Board found him not credible.
Sahibjot Singh, Edmonton | Agreed to a deportation order; the Immigration and Refugee Board decision is dated 26 June 2026. Admitted discharging prohibited weapons for a criminal organization but denied gang membership. CBSA alleged Bishnoi affiliation.
These are immigration findings, not criminal convictions.
Nationally, the CBSA reported on 25 June 2026 that it had opened 484 extortion-related immigration investigations, issued 139 removal orders and enforced 81 removals as of 18 June 2026 — up from 372, 70 and 35 respectively in March.
Agencies on the File
Legal Status in Canada | Listed terrorist entity since 29 September 2025
Leadership | Bishnoi in Indian custody; Brar a fugitive; Anmol Bishnoi in NIA custody
Canadian Centre of Gravity | Lower Mainland B.C. — Surrey, Abbotsford, Vancouver
Primary Canadian Activity | Extortion of South Asian businesses, enforced by shootings and arson
Principal Enforcement Pressure | B.C. Extortion Task Force, CBSA removals, US Operation Hard Ball indictments
Trend | Reported extortion volume in Surrey has risen, not fallen, since the September 2025 listing
Indian State Direction | Alleged by the RCMP; denied by India; not established in any court
- Canada Gazette, Part II — SOR/2025-201, Order Amending the Regulations Establishing a List of Entities (8 October 2025)
- Canada Gazette, Part II — SOR/2025-31, listing of seven transnational criminal organizations (registered 19 February 2025)
- Public Safety Canada — “Government of Canada lists the Bishnoi Gang as a terrorist entity” (29 September 2025)
- U.S. Department of Justice, Central District of California — Operation Hard Ball indictments (7 July 2026)
- BC RCMP — Extortion Task Force updates (28 November 2025; 20 January 2026)
- Canada Border Services Agency — Update on enforcement actions targeting extortion across Canada (25 June 2026)
- Surrey Police Service — Extortion reporting statistics (accessed 26 August 2026)
- Government of British Columbia — Provincial extortion task force announcement (17 September 2025)
- FINTRAC — Special Bulletin on money laundering associated with extortion directed at Canada’s South Asian diaspora (April 2026)
- Global News (Stewart Bell) — Reporting on the classified CBSA tactical guide (5 August 2026) and the RCMP internal assessment (13 January 2026)
- CBC News — Coverage of the listing and of the Nijjar prosecution
- BC Prosecution Service — Statement on the custody status of the Nijjar accused (January 2025)
- BBC — Reporting on Lawrence Bishnoi’s Indian cases and estimated network size