EXCLUSIVE: Classified report reveals how India’s Bishnoi gang uses Canada’s student visa program

The top lieutenant of the Indian gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, Goldy Brar arrived in Canada in 2017, ostensibly to attend Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C.

But it is “unknown” if he ever went to class, records show.

Instead, he helped Bishnoi expand his criminal organization into Canada, allegedly instigating high-profile murders, a political assassination and an extortion crisis.

A classified intelligence report obtained by Global News reveals the Bishnoi gang’s Canadian franchise has relied heavily on Indian youths who, like Brar, entered the country on student visas.

Written by the Canada Border Services Agency, the report cites the gang’s “growing operational presence in Canada” and “demonstrated use of Canada’s immigration programs for criminal purposes.”

“Investigations increasingly identify Indian foreign nationals on study permits and work permits as participants in these organized criminal activities,” the CBSA’s Intelligence and Investigations Directorate wrote.

“The sustained expansion of Bishnoi-linked extortions and the involvement of student permit and work permit holders raises significant concerns for CBSA operations.”

The “Tactical Guide,” titled “The Bishnoi Gang: An Emerging Threat in Canada,” was circulated in December 2025 to help immigration officers tackle the crime group as it preyed upon the country’s South Asian communities.

Although classified, a copy made public by the court shows how the government’s controversial foreign student program may have contributed to Canada’s Indian gang problem.

According to the report, Canada’s overall extortion rate had dipped 10 percent in 2024. But the number of Indian citizens charged with extortion that year spiked 47 per cent.

The increase reflected a growing trend in which South Asian Canadians reported receiving calls from Bishnoi members demanding large sums of money, the CBSA said.

As police investigated the extortions, the report said two similarities emerged: the name Goldy Brar and suspects who were in Canada on student and work visas.

“The upwards trend in extortion charges mirrors a similar trajectory seen with serious and organized crime charges within the Indian student permit holder demographic,” the report added.

Crimes by Indian student permit holders soared 8,800 per cent between 2016 and 2024, said the report, which ranked India the “top source” country of foreign students charged with crimes.

“It would be prudent to recognize that these statistics likely underrepresent the extent of the issue as many crimes go undetected and unreported,” it noted.

Between 2019 and 2023, 4,000 Indian citizens who entered Canada on study permits were charged with 17,929 offences.

A third of the charges, or 4,920, were considered serious or organized crime-related, while 97 per cent of those offences were deemed violent, it added.

In 2024, more than 13,040 criminal charges were laid against Indian citizens in Canada on study visas, which was a significant jump, according to the report.

The report does not mention that the 2,418 who were charged represent just over one per cent of the 188,125 Indian students that year, but rather emphasizes the upward trend.

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When the government capped foreign student visas in late 2024, it cited pressure on housing for the change, but the CBSA report examines another possible consequence.

Amid a surge of international students that reached more than 800,000 in 2022, Canada appears to have opened the door to India’s most notorious crime group.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which issues student visas, did not answer questions about whether it had inadvertently helped the Bishnoi gang take root in Canada.

A spokesperson said the international student program was down 83 per cent since two years ago, while Indian nationals now account for a quarter of visas as opposed to 41 per cent.

But Prof. Kelly Sundberg, a criminologist and former CBSA officer, said the immigration department’s “wide-open, honour-based” foreign student program was clearly exploited by the Bishnoi gang.

Lacking adequate screening, the program let gang leaders into the country and gave them a pool of youths from which to recruit, said Sundberg, one of several experts who reviewed the CBSA report for Global News.

“It’s a perfect storm of nonsensical policy and law resulting in a flood of young foreigners into Canada with limited supports for them once here, leaving them prey for the criminals of their home country to recruit them here,” he said.

“Ottawa is 100 per cent to blame.”

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The report’s conclusions about the Bishnoi gang and student visas are supported by more recent information that has emerged at the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Over the past six months, suspected Bishnoi members arrested during Canada’s crackdown on Indian extortion gangs have been appearing at deportation hearings.

At the proceedings that Global News has attended or reviewed through documents, the CBSA tactical guide has been repeatedly cited as a source.

The cases concerned gunmen who had shot up the homes and businesses of their victims in B.C., Alberta and Ontario, and gang associates who had played lesser roles.

But aside from Indian citizenship, the gang members had something else in common: they had entered the country on Canadian government student visas.

Goldy Brar pioneered the method. The gang’s most senior member in Canada, he used his student visa to enter the country to run its North American operation.

Two years after arriving in B.C., he tried to cement his immigration status by making a refugee claim in February 2019, according to the intelligence report.

Brar has since been accused of killing a youth leader in India and Punjabi music star Sidhu Moose Wala, who had returned to India after studying in Canada.

Brar was scheduled to make his case for refugee status at a June 14, 2022 hearing. He never showed up and the Refugee Protection Division deemed his claim had been abandoned.

But according to an indictment recently unsealed in the U.S., Brar was onto the Bishnoi gang’s next scheme by then: killing a Canadian Sikh activist wanted by India.

To carry out the slaying, Brar allegedly oversaw the recruitment of Indian youths in Edmonton and Brampton, Ont., all of whom were in Canada on student or work permits.

On June 18, 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar was leaving the Surrey, B.C., temple where he served as president when two gunmen opened fire and fled to a getaway car.

Canadian authorities suspect Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was behind the killing, and accused Indian diplomats of sharing information on Canadians critical of his administration with the Bishnoi gang.

“These allegations suggest potential overlap between organized crime and state-linked actors pursuing parallel objectives,” the CBSA wrote in its report.

The CBSA is part of Project SEVA, a task force led by the RCMP that aims to disrupt and investigate “foreign actor interference” linked to India, the report said.

Following the Nijjar murder, the Bishnoi gang claimed responsibility for killing Sukhdool Singh Gill, a member of the rival Bambiha crime group in Winnipeg, the report said.

It also doubled down on its primary money-making scheme: spreading fear among South Asian Canadians in cities such as Surrey, Edmonton and Brampton to extort money from them.

Victims received WhatsApp messages demanding large sums, reinforced with threats. If they didn’t pay up, gunmen peppered their homes and businesses with bullets.

Videos of shootings recorded by the gunmen quickly appear on social media to claim responsibility, along with boasts and further threats from Bishnoi leaders.

The gang’s goal is not just to profit through extortion, said Wade Deisman, a criminology professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C.

Rather, Bishnoi is trying to create a climate in which Canadians of South Asian origin “are going to kind of submit to there being a taxation scheme,” Deisman said.

“It’s not an extortion crisis, it’s a public safety crisis.”

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The Bishnoi gang has been a student-based crime group from the start. Lawrence Bishnoi emerged in student politics at Panjab University.

After losing in the 2011 student election, he allegedly shot the winning candidate and became president, using his position to wage violence and thefts.

He has been in an Indian prison since 2015, but has still become such a menace to Canada that the government added the Bishnoi gang to its list of terrorist groups last September.

“Evidence suggests the Bishnoi gang’s major operations continue to be orchestrated by Bishnoi from behind bars,” the CBSA intelligence report said.

To do so, he has allegedly relied on cell phones and lieutenants like Brar who in turn recruit members of Canada’s surging Indian student population to do their dirty work.

As a recent example, the intelligence report cited the case of Abjeet Kingra, who came to B.C. on a student visa in 2018 before being recruited as a gunman.

While working at a Winnipeg moving company, a colleague offered him $4,000 to accompany him to Vancouver Island for a shooting, Kingra testified at his deportation hearing.

Kingra said he was struggling in Canada and did it for the money. “Because I thought I would be able to help my family back home in India, because my job wasn’t going well here.”

On the night of Sept. 2, 2024, Kingra fired 14 shots at the Colwood, B.C., home of Punjabi musician A.P. Dhillon while his accomplice set fire to the vehicles in the driveway.

Police believe Brar’s suspected North American operations manager, Rohit Godara, was behind the attack. Kingra was convicted over the incident last year.

Canada’s refugee board ordered Kingra’s deportation in June, while in Edmonton, another student named Jashandeep Singh also faces deportation for his role in Bishnoi.

Singh allegedly got involved in the gang through yet another Indian in Canada on a student visa, Arshdeep Singh, whom he met at Edmonton’s Campbell College.

“These students, they meet the profile of the same people who work for Lawrence Bishnoi and other gangsters in India,” said Gurpreet Singh, a veteran B.C. journalist.

“So it’s the same thing which is happening here.”

Police believe Arshdeep Singh reported to Goldy Brar, whom the CBSA report said “has been named by multiple victims of recent extortion attempts in Canada.”

Whether Brar is making the extortion calls himself, using associates to make demands on his behalf or if copycats have begun dropping his name for impact remains uncertain.

But recent intelligence “indicates that Goldy’s name is the one most often used in extortion cases” in Alberta, according to the CBSA report.

In 2025, extortion gangs expanded their target base from Punjabi Sikhs to include a wider array of “other Indo-Canadian diaspora groups,” the report said.

“This is in stark contrast to what was seen across Canada in 2023 and 2024, and does not align with the original modus operandi of Bishnoi Gang-related extortions and killings targeting alleged members of the pro-Khalistan movement or those who may have voiced concerns against the Government of India,” it said.

Sikh Federation of Canada leader Moninder Singh, who has been warned four times about credible plots to kill him, said the government should be more transparent about the possible involvement of Indian officials.

“The central issue is not simply how the Bishnoi group operates in Canada, but how Indian intelligence and diplomatic officials have used that criminal network to surveil, intimidate, extort and attack Sikhs in Canada,” he said.

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Extortion rates have declined since January in hard-hit Surrey, as police and immigration officials have ramped up investigations, according to police statistics.

But Deisman, who has been researching Bishnoi since speaking to victims at a town hall on the topic in Surrey eight months ago, is skeptical about those figures.

“My impression is that it’s gone underground, that people are hunkering down,” he said. “They are playing it safe, and playing safe means submitting, playing ball.”

Further, the Bishnoi gang is not the only problem. Another crime group, the Ruffians, has also “arisen out of the Indian student community” and includes members on work and study permits, according to a separate CBSA document.

The Bishnoi gang has begun to fracture since its debut in Canada. Brar and his alleged manager Rohit Godara had a falling out with their longtime boss in recent months.

The intelligence report alleges the split happened because Brar and Godara would not help Bishnoi’s brother Amnol after he was arrested by U.S. immigration officials.

Both Brar and Godara later took responsibility for killing Bishnoi associate Jora Sidhu, whom police said was linked to extortions in B.C. and Alberta.

The CBSA said the joint claims from Brar and Godara for Sidhu’s stabbing death in Dubai in November 2025 may “indicate that they are working together.”

Godara has called Bishnoi a traitor, while Brar accused his former leader of killing a mutual friend, Inderpreet “Parry” Singh, in India and accused him of betrayal.

The gang leaders also face mounting criminal charges in several countries.

On July 7, the U.S. unsealed an indictment that charged Bishnoi, Brar and Godara with racketeering. Bishnoi and Brar were also accused of ordering Nijjar’s assassination.

For now, Bishnoi remains in an Indian prison, while Brar and Godara are still on the loose. The FBI has offered a US$50,000 reward for information leading to Brar’s arrest.

Rumours that Brar had died in California, escaped to Europe or was hiding in Surrey, having changed his appearance, remain unverified.

“His whereabouts remain unknown,” the CBSA wrote.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca