Punjab state police in northwest India said they had arrested Sikh separatist leader Amritpal Singh Sandhu, wanted since mid-March. Singh had been accused of attempted murder and of the crime of “threat to social order” for having attacked a police station together with some of his followers: last March 18 he had escaped arrest, starting a large search operation which had the region on the border with Pakistan was blocked for a few days. A Punjab police official said Singh would be taken to a high-security jail in northeast India’s Assam state, where other followers of him are being held.
Singh is 30 years old and is the religious leader of the radical movement Waris Punjab De (Heirs of Punjab), which supports the separatist wishes of the Sikhs in the region. He was practically unknown until a year ago, when he returned to Punjab after ten years spent in Dubai to replace the head of the movement, who died in a car accident. On 23 February, Singh had attacked a police station near the city of Amritsar together with a group of followers, armed with swords and pistols, to ask for the release of one of his collaborators: the police had agreed to his requests also in order not to risk a religious clash, but then had begun to look for him to arrest him. Now the law provides that based on the crimes he is accused of, he can be detained for up to a year, without being formally charged.
Sikhs are followers of a monotheistic religion born in India about 500 years ago: almost 25 percent of them live outside India, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, while Punjab is the only Indian state where they are the majority . Between the 1980s and early 1990s, the Sikh independence movement had led to a period of violence: then it was repressed, until it became a minority.
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