EDMONTON Police Constable Kevin St. Louis this week told an Immigration and Refugee Board member overseeing a hearing for a suspected member of the gang that every individual that police identified during this investigation “is a temporary foreign worker or on a student visa and relatively new to Canada.”
He said the people carrying out violent acts in Canada are at the bottom of a pyramid that sees them paid a very small financial gain. “I think a lot of them look at it as being part of an organization or group,” he added.
St. Louis, giving evidence at an admissibility hearing for Jashandeep Singh, an Indian national, said India’s Lawrence Bishnoi gang purportedly wrote to Abbotsford Police last summer that they had more than 1,000 people in Canada to carry out extortions.
CBC’s Jason Proctor reported that St. Louis testified that as the investigation continued, Edmonton Police believe there was a fracture in the group that resulted in several different groups carrying out the same type of crime.
St. Louis said three names of leaders emerged through WhatsApp texts and phone calls: Lawrence Bishnoi; Bishnoi’s former ally and now his enemy, Goldy Brar; and a person identified as Jora Sidhu.
“According to Indian media reports, a close Bishnoi associate by the same name, also known as Sippa, had his throat slit in Dubai in December in a killing credited to a rival gangster,” Proctor reported.
