Singh and his supporters raided a police station in February after one of many preacher’s aides was arrested.
Indian police have arrested Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh after trying to find him for greater than a month, a state police official says of an operation towards the revival of an impartial Sikh homeland within the state of Punjab bordering Pakistan.
The rise of Singh – a preacher within the northwestern state of Punjab, the place Sikhs are the bulk – has revived discuss of such a homeland and stoked fears of a return to violence of the Eighties and early Nineties.
“Amritpal Singh has been arrested from the Rode village in Moga district, Punjab, on the premise of particular intelligence,” Sukhchain Singh Gill, a high official within the Punjab police, informed reporters on Sunday.
Singh and supporters armed with swords, knives and weapons raided a police station in February after one of many preacher’s aides was arrested for assault and tried kidnapping.
Authorities deployed hundreds of officers within the manhunt and reduce off cell web for days in Punjab, a state of 30 million individuals.
They arrested greater than 100 of his followers, transferring them to jails a whole lot of kilometres away, and banned gatherings of greater than 4 individuals in some areas.
Police have accused Singh and his supporters of tried homicide, obstruction of regulation enforcement and creating disharmony and mentioned he had been on the run since mid-March.
He was arrested within the village gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, underneath the Nationwide Safety Act, which permits for these thought-about a menace to nationwide safety to be detained with out cost for as much as a yr, the police official mentioned.
Gill mentioned Singh could be moved to Dibrugarh within the northeastern state of Assam, the place a few of his associates are already in jail.
Arrest ‘vital’
Journalist and the editor of Hardnews journal Sanjay Kapoor believes Pal’s will improve tensions in Punjab.
“In Punjab there was an awesome demand amongst individuals there that nothing needs to be accomplished to upset the peace … in a state which has been experiencing a large amount of turbulence all these years,” he informed Al Jazeera from Delhi.
“They didn’t need Mr. Pal to do something greater than what he had accomplished … and in a means, it didn’t actually trigger the turmoil that was anticipated of him. So his arrest now’s vital.”
Punjab, which is about 58 p.c Sikh and 39 p.c Hindu, was rocked by a violent separatist motion for a state known as Khalistan within the Eighties and early Nineties, during which hundreds of individuals died.
The Indian authorities performed a botched 1984 raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest website in Sikhism. Lots of of individuals have been killed in what was known as Operation Blue Star, which led to the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh safety guards a couple of months later.
Her assassination sparked an anti-Sikh pogrom in New Delhi and elsewhere that lasted a number of days and killed hundreds extra individuals, together with kids who have been shot, overwhelmed and burned to loss of life.
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