LONDON: Two men have been charged with attacking the Indian military chief who led the contentious 1984 Amritsar Golden Temple assault, British police said yesterday.
Retired lieutenant general Kuldip Singh Brar, 78, was attacked in a street near one of London’s main shopping areas, Oxford Street, on September 30.
The two accused men, both from Birmingham in central England, are in custody and were to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.
Barjinder Singh Sangha, 33 from Wolverhampton, and Mandeep Singh Sandhu, 34, have both been charged with wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm. Sangha was further charged with common assault on Brar’s wife Meena.
Brar commanded Operation Blue Star, ordered by then-prime minister Indira Gandhi to flush out militants holed up in Sikhdom’s holiest shrine demanding an independent Sikh homeland.
Four months afterwards, Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards in retaliation.
That triggered anti-Sikh riots in which thousands of people were killed, most of them in the streets of the Indian capital New Delhi.
