Pak based Khalistani radical is the real face of Ludhiana blast
Intelligence inputs show Sandhu, who is about 35 years old, is suspected to be living in Pakistan after acquiring an Indian passport on a fake identity by changing his appearance.
A Pakistan-based radical, who along with a pro-Khalistan terrorist in Germany played a crucial role in the blast inside the sessions court in Punjab’s Ludhiana, is reportedly sheltered by terrorist groups in the neighbouring country as well as Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
He is associated with Babbar Khalsa International chief Wadhawa Singh, who is based in Lahore. (Sourced)
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‘Category A’ wanted gangster and Khalistani radical, Harvinder Singh Sandhu, who uses the alias Rinda Sandhu, and Jaswinder Singh Multani, a Germany based pro-Khalistan terrorist, have been tasked by the Pakistani spy agency ISI to carry out terror attacks to destabilise Punjab in ahead of the assembly elections next year, security officials have said.
Intelligence inputs show Sandhu, who is about 35 years old, is suspected to be living in Pakistan after acquiring an Indian passport on a fake identity by changing his appearance. He is associated with Babbar Khalsa International chief Wadhawa Singh, who is based in Lahore.
Sandhu, who migrated to Nanded in Maharashtra from the Sarhali village in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district, is also involved in large scale cross border smuggling of drugs and weapons.
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“He is most wanted A+ Category Gangster of Punjab. He is also wanted in Maharashtra, Chandigarh, Haryana and West Bengal etc,” officials said.
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“He is most wanted A+ Category Gangster of Punjab. He is also wanted in Maharashtra, Chandigarh, Haryana and West Bengal etc,” officials said.
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Sandhu was arrested for the first time after he killed a man in 2008 over personal enmity in Tarn Taran. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder and spent time in different jails of Punjab. In October 2014, he was released on bail from the Nabha jail.
He also killed a granthi of a gurdwara and disposed of his body in a canal in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab in 2016 to avenge the killing of his brother. He also killed two other men in Nanded and Wazirabad—both in Maharashtra—again to avenge his brother.
He has been declared an absconder and is wanted in at least 30 criminal cases, including 10 murders, 6 cases of attempt to murder, 7 cases of dacoities and snatching besides abductions, extortions and cases under the Arms Act and NDPS Act.
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In 2017, Sandhu managed to escape from a hotel during a routine checking in West Bengal but the police arrested Harpreet Kaur, who he married earlier that year, and another couple.
In 2018, after his arrest gangster Dilpreet Singh Dhahan alias Baba for a shooting attempt at Punjabi singer Parmish Verma disclosed that Sandhu, his associate, was in touch with the Pakistan-based terrorist and Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) chief Wadhawa Singh Babbar.
Declared an absconder, Sandhu appeared in an interview on the web news channel Pro Punjab on June 24, 2021.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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