Wanted in India, Free in the US, Canada; Transnational Gangs Thrive
They were wanted men in India. They reached the United States and Canada on student visas and asylum claims, and from quiet addresses in California and British Columbia they rebuilt the criminal empires they had left behind. American and Canadian police are only now catching up.
In December 2023, a businessman in India picked up a video call and found himself looking at one of the most feared crime bosses in the country. The caller did something strange for a man who had spent years avoiding the law. He let his face be seen. Pay, he told the businessman, or die.
The victim took a screenshot. According to the FBI, that image is now part of the evidence in a federal case being run out of Sacramento, roughly eight thousand miles from the prison cell the caller was sitting in.
The man on the screen was Lawrence Bishnoi. He has been locked up in India for most of the past decade. And yet the people who carry out his orders, the men who place the calls, collect the money and arrange the shootings, are no longer in India at all. A federal indictment unsealed in California in November 2025 puts a number of them in the United States.
This is the part worth sitting with. The threat is not on its way. It has been here for years, and it is growing.
Wrong people in the crosshairs
Washington spends much of its energy talking about illegal immigration. The men at the center of this story do not fit that conversation. They are not laborers who slipped across a border looking for work. They are fugitives wanted in their own country for murder, extortion and drug trafficking, and most of them came in through the front door, on student visas and asylum applications. Once here, they went back to work.
A former DHS officer said that they did not arrive to prey on Americans. Not at first. They came because the United States and Canada were safe ground from which to commit crimes against people back home. From an apartment in the Central Valley or a suburb outside Vancouver, a man can order a killing in India and sleep soundly, knowing that extradition is slow, that an asylum claim can stretch on for years, and that a notice from Indian police will not, by itself, get him arrested.
Then the model grew up. The same crews that terrorized businessmen in Delhi started calling shop owners in Sacramento. The same logistics networks that moved guns and cash began moving cocaine and the chemicals used to make fentanyl. A safe house became a headquarters.
Three governments now describe the same organization in strikingly similar language. The FBI calls it one of India’s most wanted criminal networks. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police calls it a transnational criminal organization. Indian police call it a syndicate that reaches across continents. None of them contradict the others. That kind of agreement, across three countries that do not always see eye to eye, is rare.
The men who fled the law
What follows is drawn from an inter-governmental fugitive list accessed by Newsweek via verified sources in India, across continents, federal indictments, Interpol notices, filings by India’s National Investigation Agency, statements from Indian state police, and publically available Canadian government records. Everyone named here is the subject of public charges, a formal designation, or law enforcement action. Allegations remain allegations until a court says otherwise.
Lawrence Bishnoi sits at the center. He is named by India’s National Investigation Agency as the head of a crime and terror syndicate, the subject of a federal case in Delhi, and a man facing roughly eighty criminal cases across several Indian states under the country’s anti-terror law, its penal code and its arms statutes. From prison, according to the FBI, he runs his operation through encrypted apps, relaying instructions to operatives in the United States. The December 2023 video call is one of the few times he has been tied, on camera, directly to a threat.
Anmol Bishnoi, his younger brother, was for a while the most important figure the network had on American soil. India’s investigators say he kept the syndicate running from the United States, sheltered its shooters, and arranged extortion back home from foreign ground. He fled India in 2022 on a forged passport, moving through Dubai and Kenya before settling in California, where his asylum claim was eventually rejected. He faces at least eighteen cases in India, among them the October 2024 murder of the politician Baba Siddique, the shooting outside the actor Salman Khan’s home in April 2024, and the 2022 killing of the singer Sidhu Moose Wala. American authorities removed him to India on November 18, 2025. He was arrested the moment he landed.
Goldy Brar, whose given name is Satinderjit Singh, is the man who publicly claimed the Moose Wala killing. India has designated him a terrorist under its anti-terror law, the UAPA, and he is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice. Indian agencies told Newsweek that he is presently in the United States. He is wanted in more than forty cases and remains one of the names India most wants back.
Behind the brothers sits a layer of operatives that the dossiers accessed by Newsweek describe in unsettling detail.
Arshdeep Singh Gill, known as Arsh Dala, is described as a UAPA-designated terrorist and gangster, and a close handler of the KTF working with Bambiha gang members. Indian authorities accuse him of targeted killings, murder, attempted murder, narcotics and arms smuggling, and extortion. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, wanted in more than fifty-four cases, and is based in Canada.
Bhanu Pratap Singh, who goes by Bhanu Rana, is described as a close confidant of Anmol Bishnoi and a member of the Kala Rana gang. He is wanted for murder and cross-border narcotics smuggling, carries an Interpol Red Notice, and is based in the United States, where he was recently reported to have been attacked by a rival crew.
Arvind Kumar, known as Gilli and Sunil Kumar, is described as a Lawrence Bishnoi gang member wanted in more than six cases involving cross-border narcotics smuggling, murder, attempted murder, dacoity, extortion and illegal firearms. The dossier says an open-dated warrant has been issued against him and that he entered the United States through an illegal immigration route.
Charanjit Singh, known as Rinku Randhawa and Rinku Bihla, is described as a Khalistani extremist and gangster linked to the KTF and the Sukha Lamme group. He is accused in twenty-nine cases involving murder, attempted murder, extortion and targeted killing. Indian authorities place him in Canada.
Darmanjot Singh, known as Darman Kahlon, is described as having illegally entered the United States through a human-trafficking network in 2019. The dossier links him to Jaggu Bhagwanpuria, Harwinder Singh Sandhu alias Rinda, and U.S.-based Happy Passia, and accuses him of helping smuggle firearms, explosives and narcotics into Punjab in India.
Gurlal Singh, known as Gurlal Rudiana, is described as associated with Gurdev Shah/Jassal and Lakhbir Singh Landa. Indian authorities revealed to Newsweek he handled two people arrested by Punjab Police in 2025 for alleged espionage and cross-border smuggling. He is wanted in more than seven cases and is based in the United States.
Harbir Singh is described as having illegally entered the United States through human-trafficking channels in 2023. The dossier links him to U.S.-based BKI-linked Harpreet Singh alias Happy Passia and accuses him of involvement in explosions, murders and terror activity in Punjab, India.
Harichand Jat, who goes by Harry Boxer, is described by Indian investigators as a weapons supplier for the Bishnoi and Rohit Godara extortion operation, working on Anmol Bishnoi’s instructions. He is wanted in more than eighteen cases of murder, extortion and narcotics in Rajasthan and Delhi, carries an Interpol Red Notice, and is based in the United States.
Harpreet Singh, known as Happy Passia, is described as having illegally entered the United States through human-trafficking channels. Indian authorities link him to Pakistan-based BKI-linked Harwinder Singh Sandhu alias Rinda and accuse him of coordinating explosions, murders and terror activity in Punjab. The dossier says he was in ICE custody in San Francisco and is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice.
Himanshu Sughadh, known as Bhau Ritolia and Kunal, is described as the leader of the Himanshu Bhau gang and associated with Neeraj Bawana, Kala Khairampuri and the Devender Bambiha gang. He is wanted in more than forty cases involving murder, attempted murder, cross-border narcotics smuggling, dacoity, extortion and criminal conspiracy. Indian authorities place him in the United States.
Husandeep Singh, known as Husna, was arrested by California police along with an associate in connection with a December 2022 shooting in Woodland. Indian authorities want him for extortion and targeted killings. The dossier says he is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice and is based in the United States.
Jaskaranpreet Singh, known as Kannu and Karan, is described as associated with the Devender Bambiha group and Jaspreet Singh alias Jass Behal. The dossier says he was a handler in the murder of Hardeep Singh in August 2025 and the mastermind behind an attack on Ranjit Singh Kang. It says he is under arrest in the United States by ICE.
Jitender, known as Sonu Bakali and Rajesh, is described as a member of the Lawrence Bishnoi and Kaka Rana gangs. Indian authorities accuse him in cases involving murder, attempted murder, dacoity, extortion and illegal firearms. He is described as an absconder based in the United States.
Lakhbir Singh Sandhu, known as Landa, is described in the dossier as an alleged gangster and terrorist associated with BKI. The dossier says he has worked with Pakistan-based Harwinder Singh Sandhu alias Rinda, later formed his own gang, and is involved in more than eighty cases involving murder, attempted murder, extortion, illegal arms, and cross-border drugs and weapons smuggling. India has designated him as an individual terrorist under UAPA and places him in Canada.
Lipin Nehra, based in Canada, is accused of arranging shooters for the Moose Wala killing and is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice.
Munish, known as Kaka Rana, entered the United States through illegal channels in 2023 and now runs his own crew while operating for the Bishnoi gang across the Haryana districts of Karnal, Ambala, Kaithal and Yamunanagar, according to police there. His method, investigators say, is simple. He makes his extortion demands over WhatsApp, and when they are ignored, he has people at home carry out the violence. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice and is based in the United States.
Neeraj Pandit, known as Neeraj Dutt, Neeraj Faridpuriya and Kapil Sharma, is described as a member of the Himanshu Bhau and Kaushal Chaudhary gangs. Indian authorities accuse him in cases involving cross-border narcotics smuggling, murder, attempted murder, dacoity, extortion and illegal firearms. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice and is based in the United States.
Prince Chauhan, known as Prince Kurali, Jahar Singh and Paras, is described as a member of the Devinder Bambiha gang. The dossier accuses him of murder, attempted murder, extortion, arranging logistics for gang members and supplying arms, ammunition and documents for criminal activity in Punjab. It links him to the murder of Youth Akali Dal leader Vicky Middukhera and places him in the United States or Canada.
Rajesh Kumar, known as Sonu Khatri, is described as a Lawrence Bishnoi gang member wanted in cases involving cross-border narcotics smuggling, murder, attempted murder, dacoity, extortion and illegal firearms. Indian authorities describe him as an absconder staying in the United States.
Ramandeep Singh, known as Raman Judge, is described as wanted in gangster, murder, attempted murder, extortion, NDPS and UAPA-related cases. The dossier says he is a co-accused in the murder of a Dera follower in 2020 and an attack on a priest in Phillaur in 2021. It describes him as an operator of the KTF and places him in Canada.
Randeep Malik is accused of orchestrating crimes in India while running a trucking company called Mahakal Transport in the United States. He was briefly detained by American authorities in August 2025 and is wanted in cases that include charges under India’s explosives law.
Sarwan Singh, known as Bhola and Jobanjeet Kumar, is described as linked to Harpreet Singh alias Happy Passia and wanted in cases involving attempted murder and extortion. The dossier accuses him of involvement in cross-border narcotics and arms smuggling through associates operating across Pakistan, the United States and India. It says he is a Proclaimed Offender, has been declared most wanted by the Indian NIA, and is based in the United States.
Virender Charan, who has used the name Dilip Razak, is wanted by India’s anti-terror agency and is based in Canada. Indian police say he claimed responsibility for the murder of a businessman in Kuchaman, Rajasthan, on October 7, 2025, after the man refused to pay. They say he was making his calls using a Canadian internet phone number.
Yadwinder Singh, known as Yadda and Yada, is described as associated with Harwinder Singh Sandhu alias Rinda, Babbar Khalsa International and Lakhbir Singh Landa. Indian authorities accuse him of reinforcing and assisting extortion plans and moving cross-border consignments. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice and is based in the United States.
Jasmeet Singh is the case that shows how the threat crosses into North American jurisdictions, but he should be treated separately from the Indian dossier. U.S. federal prosecutors in California say Singh, an Indian national who had been living in Fresno, was indicted for transmitting threats to injure a person living in Canada. The case was investigated by the FBI, the Langley Detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations. He is detained in federal custody while awaiting trial; the charge remains an allegation unless proven in court.
The UAPA refers to India's Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the country's main anti-terror law; it must be noted that a UAPA designation is an Indian legal designation, not a U.S. terrorism designation or a conviction.
Some of the fugitives on India’s lists carry separate terrorism designations tied to older militant networks, a strand of the story that runs alongside this one. The organized crime machine is the part now reaching into American and Canadian neighborhoods, and it is the part that local police are struggling to contain.
How the machine works
The clearest public account of the mechanics did not come from an American agency. It came from India, when B. Satheesh Balan, the Inspector General of Haryana’s Special Task Force spoke to Newsweek.
“A gangster no longer needs to physically be present in Haryana to order an extortion, a shooting, or an intimidation attack,” Balan said. “That changes the policing challenge fundamentally.”
He laid out a chain that runs in seven steps. A local associate picks a target, usually a businessman, a property dealer or a contractor with money. The first call comes over the internet, most often on WhatsApp. The boss rarely speaks directly. Instead, Balan said, a middleman the gangs call a dabba relays the message, so the real handler’s identity and digital trail stay buried. If the target ignores the demand, the threats reach his family. Then local shooters fire on a home, an office or a business. Afterward, the gang claims responsibility on social media, Balan told Newsweek, “to amplify fear and establish criminal credibility.” He called it “a hybrid model combining overseas command, digital anonymity, local execution, and psychological warfare.”
The foot soldiers are young and treated as disposable. Balan described the typical recruit as a man under thirty, often vulnerable or easily impressed, pulled in through Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook and then moved onto encrypted apps. The bait is money, weapons, help settling a personal score, sometimes the promise of a route abroad. Worse, he said, some networks have shown “a disturbing willingness to use juveniles, believing they may benefit from comparatively different legal treatment under juvenile justice frameworks.”
He was firm on one point that Americans & Canadians might otherwise misread. “This recruitment is not based on caste or religion. It is fundamentally exploitative criminal targeting of vulnerable youth.”
The direction of travel worries him. He pointed to heavier use of overseas handlers, more distance built between the men giving orders and the men pulling triggers, and a growing reliance on digital money, including cryptocurrency. His description of what these fugitives have become is the line that hangs over the whole story. They are, he said, no longer simply men on the run. They are trying to become transnational crime coordinators.
The American chapter
For people in California’s Central Valley, the phrase transnational organized crime has a phone number and a price tag.
Local investigators have linked gangs based in India to around twenty shootings in the region over four years. The sheriff’s office in San Joaquin County has described taking in extortion cases at a rate of roughly two a month. The opening demand often lands between four thousand and seven thousand dollars, low enough that a frightened small business owner is tempted to pay rather than call the police. It does not read like greed. It reads like research.
Two men suspected of ties to the network have been killed on American soil, one in Stockton and one in Fresno. Indian authorities later announced the arrest of four suspects, describing them as members of a rival gang who fled back to India after the killings. On the American side, no resolution has been made public.
The FBI’s Sacramento office has become the front line of a fight that did not start here. It put out its first public warning to the Central Valley’s Indian American community in May 2024. It arrested a major suspect in April 2025, detained an alleged money handler that October, and brought the Jasmeet Singh case in November. Its own filings describe the American end of the network plainly: men relaying threats over encrypted apps, a structure that runs from a cell in India to a driveway in Fresno.
Guns, cash, and now fentanyl
The reason this story should matter beyond one community is the drug connection, the point where a diaspora crime problem becomes an American public health problem.
In February 2026, Newsweek reported on a DEA operation, code-named Meltdown, that took down an India-based network of illegal online pharmacies and seized more than two hundred web domains, with the operation tied to American overdose deaths. The same reporting noted something else worth holding onto: cooperation between Washington and New Delhi has improved. The FBI told Newsweek that cooperation from Indian agencies had grown significantly, and described how India moved after the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, pressed senior Indian officials to treat fentanyl chemicals as a priority.
That progress is real. It also sits awkwardly next to what is happening on the ground. In June 2025, the DEA arrested Opinder Singh Sian, an Indo-Canadian linked to a gang called the Brothers Keepers, in a case that exposed a supply line connecting Chinese chemical suppliers, South Asian gang logistics and Mexican cartels. Indo-Canadian truckers have pleaded guilty in American courts to hauling cocaine and heroin worth tens of millions of dollars along the corridor between California and Canada. A Punjab-born man who entered the United States through asylum was sentenced in Washington state to more than seventeen years for trafficking millions of dollars of MDMA. The same names, the same routes, the same machinery for moving money that Balan, in Haryana, says increasingly runs through cryptocurrency.
The cooperation on fentanyl is moving forward. The wider operation keeps running.
Canada said it first
If the United States has been slow to name the threat, Canada has not. On September 29, 2025, the Canadian government listed the Bishnoi gang as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code, the first national government in the world to take that step.
Talking to Newsweek, Tim Warmington, the spokesperson of the Ministry for Public Safety Canada, described the group without hedging. “The Bishnoi Gang is a transnational criminal organization operating primarily out of India.” The gang, it said, “have a presence in Canada and have been active in areas with significant diaspora communities, where it creates a climate of fear and insecurity by targeting and intimidating individuals, prominent community members, businesses, and cultural figures.”
The listing was, in the words of Public Safety Canada, “a rigorous, evidence-based process grounded in intelligence and the law,” and its effects are concrete. It makes financing, travel and recruitment for the group criminal offenses, and it feeds directly into immigration enforcement. People are inadmissible to Canada, the statement noted, if they are found to belong to organizations involved in terrorism or organized crime. Where the Canada Border Services Agency finds such a person already inside the country, it said, it would investigate and pursue enforcement, including removal.
Tim also shared that they are working with partners that include India and Canada’s Five Eyes intelligence allies, the alliance that includes the United States. The statement is notable as much for what it represents as for what it says. One member of the G7 has now built a legal tool aimed squarely at this network. The obvious question is why its closest ally has not.
The list, and the answer that never comes
Read side by side, the careful statements of three governments tell their own story.
India has been blunt. Its foreign ministry says it has twenty-six extradition requests pending with Canada going back more than a decade, many of them involving this network, and that no action has been taken on the Canadian side. India handed the United States a list of a dozen fugitives around Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s visit to Washington in February 2025. Of those twelve, the public record shows exactly one returned, Anmol Bishnoi, along with a separate deportation that Indian police secured through their own channels.
The United States has offered warm words and few specifics. After Anmol Bishnoi’s removal, the American Embassy in New Delhi said, “We appreciate our ongoing partnership with India’s security agencies as we work together to dismantle terror-associated networks and hold criminals accountable.” The U.S Department of Homeland Security pointed Newsweek to a formal notice dated November 18, 2025 which confirmed the removal directly to the family of victim Baba Siddique.
On the harder questions, the doors close politely. Asked about the rest of the names and about whether the Bishnoi gang might face any American designation, the State Department did not discuss specific investigations or its own deliberations, pointing instead to other agencies. On the record it offered only the cooperative frame. A spokesperson, speaking on background to Newsweek, described close work with India under a joint drug policy framework and said, “We have had incredible progress on this issue.”
There is a structural reason eleven of those twelve men remain. Asked how it protects Americans from criminal organizations that direct violence from abroad, Homeland Security pointed Newsweek to an internal directive governing how its agents treat Interpol notices. The rule bars officers from relying on a Red Notice alone to justify an arrest or a removal.
They have to verify the notice, screen it for signs of abuse, get a supervisor’s sign-off, request the underlying case file, and give the wanted person a chance to contest it. The policy exists for a sound reason. It keeps authoritarian governments from abusing Interpol to chase dissidents onto American soil. But it also means that a notice from a democratic ally, in a case involving documented violence, moves no faster by default than any other.
What comes next
Ask the officials, in any of the three countries, what they need, and the answer comes back to one word. Faster. Balan, in Haryana, India, put it most plainly when he said modern organized crime moves much faster than the timelines of conventional paperwork. Canadian Public Safety spokesperson described an effort still underway. The U.S State Department pointed to progress. India pointed, again, to its list.
The men are not waiting. In a few short years they have gone from extortion to murder, from one country to three, from cash to cryptocurrency, from pistols to fentanyl. The recruits keep getting younger. The phone keeps ringing in California and British Columbia. Every official account points the same direction, which is up.
The screenshot from December 2023 is, in the end, a small record of a large failure of speed. A man who should have been beyond reach turned on his camera because he was sure no one could touch him. So far, across three countries and a dozen names, he has mostly been right.
2026 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
This story was originally published June 8, 2026 at 12:45 PM.