U.S. Indictment Alleges Canada Border Agency Insider Sold Inspection Schedules to Indo-Mexican Cartel Network Moving Hundreds of Kilograms Weekly Into British Columbia

Day two analysis: The Dhanda indictment reads as the industrial blueprint of the Mexico-to-Canada corridor — and its most damning allegation is aimed at Canada's border defenses.

VANCOUVER — A sweeping American investigation into transnational Indian narcotics traffickers — the same case that names the political assassination of a Sikh separatist leader in Vancouver — alleges that a joined network of Indian and Mexican cartel operatives corrupted British Columbia’s border defenses, obtaining the Canada Border Services Agency’s truck-inspection schedules so that semi-loads of cocaine and methamphetamine collected in California could cross into Canada precisely where, and when, the inspectors were not.

The Canadian agency corruption allegation sits in the manner-and-means section of the indictment against Vancouver long-haul trucking logistics broker Ravinder Singh Dhanda. The case anchors this week’s Operation Hard Ball prosecutions — three indictments, 37 defendants, and, in the Bishnoi enterprise filing, the first court-charged accounting of the June 2023 killing outside a Surrey Sikh temple that ruptured relations between Ottawa and New Delhi.

In the Dhanda network, the grand jury alleges, border corruption work belonged to Gurtej Singh Smagh, a 43-year-old from Creston, British Columbia, who would gather “information related to the timing and location of border inspections and other enforcement actions from an individual working for the Canadian Border Services Agency” in order “to assist with smuggling cocaine and methamphetamine across the U.S.-Canada border.”

Canada's border has an inspection schedule, and according to the U.S. grand jury, the schedule was for sale.

This troubling allegation follows The Bureau's exclusive reporting last September that Canada's federal police stonewalled a U.S. government request six years ago to jointly investigate a surge of Indo-Canadian commercial trucks traveling into the southern United States to pick up staggering amounts of cocaine and methamphetamine from Mexican cartels and drive the drugs back into Canada for consumption and onward shipment overseas, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge.