Charanjit Singh who oversaw Gujarat family’s trafficking has fled to US: Cops

Police officers recalled that Charanjit Singh and Bharat Patel’s names figured prominently right in the initial stages of this probe as agents who were trafficking people.

AHMEDABAD: Charanjit Singh, one of the alleged kingpin of the human trafficking rings that illegally sent Indians abroad to countries such as the United States and Canada has fled the country to the US, of which he is a citizen, people aware of the matter said

Snow and vehicles are seen as RCMP officers search the area where a family of four froze to death after crossing the border from the US near Emerson, Manitoba, Canada. (Reuters File Photo)

Singh, who mostly operated out of Delhi, left the country about two months ago after the authorities started probing human traffickers operating in Gujarat and beyond, a senior Gujarat police officer said.

Charanjit Singh’s name figured in the probe into the trafficking of a Gujarati family of four found frozen to death on January 16 while trying to cross the US-Canada border in a blinding blizzard in sub-zero temperatures. Bharat Patel alias Bobby Patel, the agent who sent them from Gujarat’s Dingucha village in Gandhinagar district was his associate.

“As per investigations so far, the three main conspirators behind the human trafficking racket are Bharat Patel alias Bobby Patel, Guramritpal Singh and Charanjit Singh. While Bharat Patel hails from a village in Mehsana, the other two are originally from Jalandhar. Charanjit Singh has fled to the US and police are working on how to get him back,” said a Gujarat police officer associated with the investigations.

Bharat Patel essentially looked at the trafficking ring’s Gujarat operations. “Charanjit reported to Guramritpal who is also known as ‘Pablo’ Singh (after the famous Colombian drug trafficker),” the officer said.

They took anything between ₹60 lakh to 70 lakh from people desperate to move to the United States to begin a new life, even if it meant they would be illegal immigrants.

Investigations by various agencies including the crime branch and the Gujarat Crime Investigation Division (CID) have led security agencies to believe that Bobby Patel had two dozen passports.

“He initially went to the US in 1997 illegally and was caught in a year or so and even served time. Thereafter, he started using fake passports and started the human trafficking business,” said a second police officer.

Charanjit Singh, a US citizen, also runs motels in the US and has contacts who help him traffic people in Nigeria, Turkey, Mexico and Canada.

“Using their contacts, Patel and Singh would establish that the illegal immigrants were in the foreign country only as tourists and then help them cross the border from Mexico or Canada and into the US,” said the second police officer.