Law enforcement agencies across the United States, Canada, and Europe have arrested 24 defendants in a sweeping international crackdown on three India-based transnational organised crime groups, with charges that include the 2023 assassination of a prominent Indian political and religious figure in Canada, the Justice Department announced on Tuesday.
Dubbed “Operation Hard Ball,” the multi-year federal investigation resulted in 37 defendants being charged across three separate indictments, with 11 arrests made in California alone, and others in Indiana, Georgia, Canada, and Spain. Ten suspects remain at large, seven of them in the United States.
At the centre of one indictment is Lawrence Bishnoi, 33, a gangster imprisoned in India who ran his global criminal empire using smuggled contraband phones from his jail cell, directing assassinations, extortions, kidnappings, drug trafficking, and human smuggling across multiple continents.
Among the crimes alleged is the assassination of a Sikh religious and political leader outside a temple in Surrey, British Columbia, on June 18, 2023. The Canadian government designated the Bishnoi enterprise as a terrorist entity in September 2025.
A second indictment targets Jaggu Bhagwanpuria, also imprisoned in India, whose gang of over 1,000 members worldwide engaged in murder-for-hire, drug trafficking, weapons dealing, and corrupting law enforcement officers in India to extort and frame perceived rivals.
A third indictment charges a Canada-based drug smuggling network that transported hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and methamphetamine weekly from the Los Angeles area to Canada, often concealed in long-haul semi-trucks and farm vehicles.
As part of the operation, law enforcement seized approximately 1,000 kilograms of cocaine, one kilogram of heroin, $40,000 in cash, and a dozen firearms. Thirty-four search warrants were executed across the Sacramento and Los Angeles areas.
