The family members of an elderly Indian couple murdered in 2023 are suing Canadian law enforcement for allegedly failing to warn them about a potential threat from a gang.
Jagtar Sidhu and Harbhajan Sidhu, both 57 and Indian nationals, were killed on November 20, 2023, while they were visiting their children in Caledon in the province of Ontario, where they were shot dead by unidentified gunmen in what police later described was a case of “mistaken identity.”
Officers responded just before midnight that day and found Jagtar Sidhu dead and his wife injured, who later succumbed to gunshot wounds in a hospital. Their daughter, Jaspreet Kaur Sidhu, was also shot multiple times but has survived. Now she and her brother Gurdit Singh Sidhu are seeking damages amounting to CA $80 million from the Peel Regional Police (PRP) for not warning them about the threat. An officer from the force had visited their house four days before the killing.
The statement of claims in the lawsuit, cited by the outlet CBC News, said the siblings argued that PRP should have known about the credible threat, that it was linked to an associate of Canadian gangster Ryan Wedding and did not undertake a diligent investigation or disclose details to the family.
“It was reasonably foreseeable that a failure to warn the plaintiffs would lead to their injury or death,” the lawsuit said. PRP in its defence said it did not have any information that there was risk of injury to a resident at that address. It later emerged that the address may have been connected to an individual identified just as Bobby, whose home had earlier been targeted in a shooting.
Wedding, who competed for Canada in the 2002 Winter Olympics, is the alleged leader of a major North American gang. He was arrested in Mexico in January this year.
The Sidhu murders were investigated by the Caledon detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). They were identified as the victims a month after the incident. OPP later said the Sidhus were not the intended targets. Their killers have not been identified by authorities.
In an indictment in October 2024, the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California alleged that Wedding and his associate Andrew Clark, also a Canadian, “allegedly directed” the murders “in retaliation for a stolen drug shipment that passed through Southern California.”
