Indian police have arrested a firebrand Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh after more than a month’s search.
Police have accused Singh and his supporters of attempted murder, obstruction of law enforcement, and creating disharmony, and said he had been on the run since mid-March.
He was arrested in the village gurudwara, a Sikh temple, under the National Security Act, which allows for those deemed a threat to national security to be detained without charge for up to a year, a police official said.
Singh’s arrest is a move against the revival of an independent homeland in the state of Punjab bordering Pakistan.
The rise of Singh, a preacher in the northwestern state of Punjab where Sikhs are in the majority, has revived talk of an independent Sikh homeland and stoked fears of a return to violence that killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s and early 1990s during a Sikh insurgency.
The arrest of Amritpal Singh, 30 — who leads a group called Waris Punjab De (the heirs of Punjab)– comes after the self-styled preacher and hundreds of his supporters stormed a police station with swords and firearms, demanding the release of one of his aides.
Deploying thousands of officers in the manhunt, authorities cut off mobile internet for days in the Sikh-majority northern state of 30 million people in their search.
They arrested more than 100 of his followers, transferring them to jails hundreds of miles away, and banned gatherings of more than four people in some areas.
