NAVDIP Singh Sanghera, 32, of Vancouver and Harjit Singh Mann, 49, of Surrey were killed in an East Vancouver shooting on East 31st Avenue near Ross Street.
Around 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, police responded to a call of a shooting in the area. When officers arrived, they found a vehicle with two men who had been shot.
Mann was pronounced dead at the scene.
Sanghera was taken to hospital in critical condition, but succumbed to his injuries early Friday morning.
The Vancouver Police Major Crime Section and Gang Crime Unit were called to the scene.
These are Vancouver’s fifth and sixth homicides in 2017.
NAVDIP Sanghera was a member of the Sanghera crime group that has been dominating Vancouver’s South Slope especially since the 2012 murder of notorious gangster Ranjit Singh Cheema.
Back in February 2014, in a piece titled, “Is South Slope of Vancouver headed back to notorious days of Bindy Johal versus Dosanjh brothers type of rivalry?” VOICE’s Rattan Mall wrote: “Traditionally, South Slope of Vancouver has been a hotbed of South Asian gangs since the days of Bindy Johal and brothers Ron and Jimmy Dosanjh.”
Without identifying the Sanghera group, The VOICE noted: “Some members of the group that is dominant now were recently released from jail and their associates have been reportedly “influencing high school kids like the old days,” police sources said.”
Sanghera was one of the members of the Sanghera group that were arrested in 2009 as Vancouver Police cracked down on South Slope gangs. He was convicted on firearms charges and sentenced to nine years in jail.
Charges against Udham Sanghera, the alleged leader, and Gordon Taylor were stayed in 2011. Sanghera’s son and another nephew were also later convicted of a number of firearm offences. Two other co-accused were acquitted.
Back in 2009 then-Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu had announced that two gangs—the Sanghera group and the Buttar-Malli group—were killing each other for profit and territory and added: “There is a gang war and it’s brutal.”
Police said at the time that more than 100 shootings in the past two years could be attributed to the conflict and that between October 2007 and October 2008, there were 14 gangland slayings in Vancouver.
Police said that some group members were arrested on their way to kill rivals.
Tejinder Singh Malli, 29, of Richmond, who led his own crime group, died on March 11, 2014, after having been shot a day earlier in downtown Vancouver’s Coal Harbour neighborhood. Staff-Sgt. Lindsey Houghton of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit – BC told the VOICE at the time that over the years Malli’s allegiances and associations changed a lot. He had conflicts with the UN gang and some of the people who were associated with that gang. He was also involved in Vancouver’s South Slope gang conflict and had a longstanding association to the Red Scorpions as well as the Buttar crime group.
