New Delhi:

The Indian man charged in an alleged plot to kill Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun had been detained on the request of the US, the federal government of the Czech Republic has informed NDTV. Nikhil Gupta was detained on the Prague airport in June and, the Czech authorities mentioned, the US had submitted an extradition request two months later.

Responding to a collection of queries despatched by NDTV, the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Justice mentioned the extradition had been requested for conspiracy to commit “homicide for rent”.

“The Ministry of Justice of the Czech Republic can affirm that Mr. Nikhil Gupta was apprehended and afterwards taken into provisional custody within the Czech Republic on the request of the competent authority of the USA, which subsequently submitted the request for extradition of Mr Gupta to the USA in August 2023. The extradition of Mr Gupta was requested for the crime of conspiracy to commit homicide for rent,” the ministry mentioned.

The ministry mentioned the Municipal Public Prosecution Workplace in Prague performed a preliminary investigation after which filed a movement to declare the extradition admissible.

“Upon this movement, the Municipal Court docket in Prague dominated that the extradition of Mr. Gupta to the USA is admissible. Nevertheless, the choice of the Municipal Court docket in Prague shouldn’t be but in authorized power,” it added.

To a query on entry to Czech court docket information, the ministry mentioned the choices of courts usually are not publicly out there on-line.

The US Division of Justice has charged Mr Gupta with conspiring with an Indian authorities official to assassinate Pannun on American soil. The Khalistani terrorists holds citizenship of each the US and Canada.

Mr Gupta, 52, is accused of making an attempt to rent a hitman, who turned out to be an undercover US federal agent. 

Of their indictment, US federal prosecutors have addressed the Indian official as “CC-1” and claimed he masterminded the plot from India to eradicate “an lawyer and political activist who’s a US citizen of Indian origin residing in New York Metropolis”. If convicted, Mr Gupta, faces as much as 20 years in jail.

Supreme Court docket Listening to

Mr Gupta moved the Supreme Court docket on Friday, via a member of the family recognized solely as Mr X, and claimed a number of violations of elementary rights. In his petition, he has additionally requested the Indian authorities to intervene in his extradition.

A Supreme Court docket bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and SVN Bhatti termed the matter an “extraordinarily delicate challenge for the Ministry of Exterior Affairs” and informed senior advocate CA Sundaram, representing Mr Gupta, to method a court docket within the Czech Republic, in line with information company PTI. The court docket mentioned it’s going to take up the matter on January 4.