Punjab Police asks Malaysia to detain four Sikh militants

Punjab Police have warned Sikh militants not to use Malaysia as a base to launch terror strikes on India or, to destabilise the October Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

Malaysia's New Strait Times daily quoted Patiala's Senior Superintendent of Police, Ranbir Singh Khatra, as saying: "They (militants) cannot 'remote-control' from Malaysia. We are constantly gathering information on them. We are on our heels and constantly alert all the time."

"(On our part) we will use diplomatic channels to detain at least four suspected Sikh militants who are allegedly hiding in Malaysia. We thank the Malaysian government. We respect Malaysia as a sovereign state and so we need to channel our investigations through our ministry (of external affairs)," he added.

"We hope the Malaysian government will cooperate with us to fight terrorism," he said in an interview.

Khatra was responding to media reports that the Malaysian government had acknowledged that several Sikh militants, allegedly having links with the once-lethal Khalistan Liberation Force (KLF), could possibly be in the country.

Based on intelligence input, he revealed that three of the suspected Sikh militants, Harminder Singh, 45, Daljit Singh and Harpreet Singh, both in their 20s, all of whom are from Punjab, were believed to be still in hiding in Malaysia.

There are no details of the fourth suspect.

To a question why the outlawed terrorist outfit had chosen Malaysia as their base, Khatra replied: "Malaysia and Thailand are international tourist places and they can enter these countries freely. From there, they can easily move to Pakistan."

Indian security agencies have been on high alert, following the arrest of Pargat Singh, a suspected KLF militant and bomb-planting specialist, who had stayed in Malaysia for almost a year, and the discovery of 15kg of RDX explosives from another Sikh militant last month.

Since the 1980s, the Sikh militant group has waged an armed struggle to form a separate homeland for Sikhs in Punjab.

But in the 1990s, the Punjab police annihilated most of its top hardliner leaders, forcing the organisation to break up into smaller groups and operate from foreign soil.