4 Indian intelligence personnel asked to leave Australia in 2020: ABC
According to a recent ABC investigation, at least four ‘Indian intelligence personnel’ were asked to leave Australia in 2020 after allegedly attempting to obtain “sensitive defence technology and airport security protocols”. The four officials quietly left Australia, and the situation did not escalate bilaterally, according to the Australian national television.
The expulsion of the officials has put India on par with countries like “Russia and China, which are notorious for violating protocols abroad,” according to the ABC.
“They were targeting former and current politicians as well as the state police service. Crucially, they were also accused of monitoring the Australian Indian community,” the ABC report noted.
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ASIO investigated ‘nests of spies’ in 2021
The report comes after Mike Burgess, the chief of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), revealed in 2021 that the organization had broke a “nest of spies” in Australia.
Last year, ASIO investigated a foreign intelligence service’s spy network operating in Australia. “We confronted the foreign spies and quietly and professionally removed them from Australia,” Burgess stated in his 2021 address.
Burgess stated that the foreign intelligence service “monitored their country’s diaspora community”; the ABC TV investigation cited a few examples of purported monitoring actions carried out by Indian intelligence organizations.
According to the narrative, Harjinder Singh, a cab driver in Melbourne in early 2023, received a call warning him to halt a non-binding referendum on the secession of ‘Khalistan’ organised by the Indian designated terrorist outfit Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) around the world.
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According to ABC, after the calls failed to deter Singh, Indian authorities sent “people to his parents’ home in Punjab saying they should get their son to “stop” his activism in Australia”. A few months later, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist and Indian designated terrorist, was assassinated outside a gurdwara in Canada.
Four Indians have been detained and accused with the murders. Canadian officials are still investigating possible links between the murders and Indian authorities, an accusation India denies as “absurd and motivated”.
