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US court convicts Indo-Canadian lawyer
Kuldip Singh Chaggar, a criminal defence attorney, was convicted in Seattle of threatening Sunita Vartia in a cocaine-smuggling case.
An Indo-Canadian lawyer, a prominent member of the community, has been convicted by a US court of abusing his position and threatening a witness in a cocaine-smuggling case.
Kuldip Singh Chaggar, a criminal defence attorney, was convicted in Seattle of threatening Sunita Vartia last September at the Federal Detention Centre at SeaTac, reports the South Asian Observer.
Chaggar, 43, is also columnist for one of the Vancouver based Indo-Canadian papers.
Court records say that Chaggar gained access to Vartia under the guise of being her attorney. She was arrested in July 2004 on charges of smuggling 112 lb of cocaine worth more than $1.5 million across the US-Canada border at the behest of Gurpreet "Gary" Singh Dhaliwal.
The court was told on Friday that after the arrest Dhaliwal asked Chaggar to intervene and he "reached out his tentacles to try to keep tabs" on what Vartia might be telling agents and prosecutors.
Chaggar had obtained Vartia's confession and statement implicating other members of the drug gang from another attorney in the case. When he visited Vartia in prison, he put the statement on the table in front of the 20-year-old woman and was paraphrased in court records as saying others in Canada "were not happy with her". But when she expressed reluctance to retract her statement, Chaggar ominously asked her, "Where will you hide in Canada when you get out?"
