By Avani Dias and Naomi Selvaratnam | ABC News | Australia |
It was early one morning, when Samar Kohli was at work in Sydney, that he got a call on his phone from an unknown number.
The man on the other end of the line said he was an officer from Australia’s intelligence agency ASIO and that he wanted to meet up.
The meeting took place at an inconspicuous café. Two ASIO officers attended, both dressed in plain clothes. Samar Kohli asked to see their badges.
“They had basic questions,” said Mr Kohli, a Sikh community leader in western Sydney who has been involved in the global movement to create a breakaway nation in northern India.
They wanted to know whether he had seen evidence of any “foreign interference” in Australia, which he understood to mean agents working for the Indian government.
“I said ‘yes’ and I could give examples,” he said.
Mr Kohli is one of two Sikh activists to reveal how ASIO agents were monitoring the safety of the Australian Sikh community around the time one of their religious counterparts was shot dead in Vancouver, a murder the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau spectacularly blamed on Indian government agents.
The men told Foreign Correspondent they were contacted by ASIO agents and invited to attend meetings with them on several occasions.
The meetings took place in the weeks before and after Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed by two hooded gunmen in his pick-up truck outside a Vancouver Sikh temple last June.
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