Babbar Khalsa under Canadian scrutiny

A Canadian court has ordered officials to clearly analyse the atrocities committed by Sikh terrorists in the wake of an Indian refugee's claim that he was forced to peddle drugs for the Babbar Khalsa.

The ruling comes following the case of Akash Deep Singh Maan, an Indian citizen who arrived in Brampton, Ontario, in 2002, and persuaded officials that he deserved asylum.

However, the federal government appealed because he admitted having links to Babbar Khalsa.

Federal Judge Luc Martineau agreed that the case needed more scrutiny and ordered the Immigration and Refugee Board to take a second look.

Specifically, Judge Martineau has ordered refugee officials to 'perform a sufficient analysis concerning the nature of the BK to determine the respondent's degree of participation in and/or complicity with the organisation'.

Maan told Canadian authorities he fled Punjab because Babbar Khalsa recruited him as a drug mule. Maan, who was a teenager at the time, said he ran drugs five times before police arrested him.

Alleging that the police tortured him to name the people who gave him the drugs, and to implicate them as BK sympathisers, he said the events prompted him to get a student visa and apply for asylum in Canada, Canadian daily The Globe and Mail reported on Monday.

Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board found Maan credible and awarded him refugee status.

But lawyers for Canada's Immigration Minister appealed. "It is undisputed that the BK is a terrorist organisation that engages in drug trafficking in order to purchase arms and ammunition to pursue its goal," Judge Martineau said in a December 9 written ruling from Ottawa.

Judge Martineau found that the refugee tribunal had sidestepped the question of whether Maan was complicit in terrorism, given that he had admitted to being involved in criminal activity that could have benefited terrorist schemes.

The judge said that if that's the case, youth, peripheral involvement and a lack of criminal convictions are no excuse.

Any 'knowing participant of an organisation principally directed to a limited, brutal purpose' is barred from entering Canada, he said.