The murderous rise of the Indian gang using Canada's lax immigration laws to expand its network

On May 4, a gunman strolled casually into a business complex in Surrey, B.C., in broad daylight and shot Gurvikramjeet Singh Warring, an Indian immigrant who was renting an office space there.

Warring, as the CBC’s Fifth Estate would later report, turned out to be a top handler for the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, a crime syndicate based in India that has a growing network in Canada spanning B.C., Ontario and Alberta. Witnesses told CBC that the shooter walked out of the facility as casually as he had entered. Warring, 35, died from his wounds.

The brazen act of violence was only the latest in a string of killings, arsons and extortions allegedly involving the Lawrence Bishnoi gang in Canada. A rival gang took credit for the killing, but Canadian authorities have connected the Bishnoi group to a widening ripple of crime, including the murder of a Punjabi hip hop artist and a shooting at the B.C. home of another Indian-Canadian musician. Canadian intelligence officials have also claimed that the group carried out the 2023 political assassination of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down in the parking lot outside of his Surrey, B.C., temple, allegedly at the behest of Indian state actors.

Led by Lawrence Bishnoi, who is said to run the outfit from a prison in western India where he’s been incarcerated since 2015, the Bishnoi gang has continued to expand its presence in Canada, taking advantage of the country’s lax immigration laws to grow its footprint on Canadian soil.

On Tuesday, Canadian and U.S. authorities announced the arrests of 24 suspects, many of them associated with the Bishnoi gang, as part of a sweeping international clampdown on rising Indian gang activity in both countries. Three of the arrests were made in Canada, with the RCMP saying it would apply to have the suspects extradited to the U.S. to face charges. One indictment, drawing from a joint investigation between the RCMP and Federal Bureau of Investigation, explicitly charged Lawrence Bishnoi in connection with the gang leader’s alleged involvement in the Nijjar killing.

Robert Huish, an associate dean at Dalhousie University and an expert on foreign interference matters, said the latest charges mark a substantial ramp-up in enforcement against the highest levels of the Bishnoi and other Indian gangs.

“This sounds like the FBI and RCMP are well co-ordinated, and they’re not just looking at maybe one or two acts, but actually trying to get to the whole network,” Huish said. “It does boil down to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in 2023 — that was the catalyst in terms of bringing witness testimony forward, and also identifying some of the foot soldiers of the Bishnoi gang.”

Huish said the Bishnoi gang’s Canadian presence has escalated from mere criminal threat to full-fledged national security risk as new allegations of its ties to India’s government emerge.

In January 2026, Global News obtained an internal RCMP report suggesting that the crime syndicate was working on behalf of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, which has actively sought to repress pro-Khalistan sentiments among India’s Sikh diaspora. That added to Canadian officials’ earlier accusation that India had used the Bishnoi gang to conduct the 2023 assassination.