Chandigarh, October 31: Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Tuesday termed the recent attacks on members of minority communities the handiwork of forces operating from foreign soil and seeking to disturb hard-earned peace in Punjab.
Capt Amarinder said he would not allow such radical forces to spread their wings in the state. “The likes of Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Jagmeet Singh (Canadian party leader) have been making noises to destabilise Punjab again. There is a pattern to the whole thing, and the state and central agencies are working together to unravel it,” he said.
“The police are yet to come out with any concrete answer on why minorities are being targeted. Our intelligence sources do see the hand of Khalistani forces, operating from abroad. The NIA and the CBI are already working on some of these cases, and we are hopeful that these will be cracked soon,” he said, while ruling out a link between the killing of Hindu leader Vipin Sharma and the other targeted killings.
Though he denied having knowledge of the revival of a much-feared Sikh outfit active in the 1980s and 1990s, intelligence sources say this group is getting its “sleeper cells” active in Punjab. Sources said the outfit was getting huge foreign funding from gangs involved in drugs and arms smuggling, and running its operations across many countries.
He, however, said, “My government is fully geared to tackle these people. My direction to the DGP is clear: We will not tolerate religious divisiveness. My mandate to the police is that anyone found trying to split the state along communal lines would be dealt with strictly.”
