LONDON (AFP) - A man pleaded guilty in London to attacking the Indian military leader of the contentious 1984 Amritsar Golden Temple assault, in which India’s army raided a shrine occupied by Sikh separatist militants. Retired lieutenant general Kuldip Singh Brar, the commander of Operation Blue Star, ordered by India’s then-prime minister Indira Gandhi, was attacked on September 30 last year in a street off London’s main shopping thoroughfare Oxford Street. Barjinder Singh Sangha, 33, from Wolverhampton in central England, pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court to wounding with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm on Brar, 78.
He entered a not guilty plea to a further charge of common assault on Brar’s wife Meena. At the plea and case management hearing at Southwark Crown Court, two others charged with the same offence against the retired military chief pleaded not guilty. Mandeep Singh Sandhu, 34, from Birmingham in central England, and Dilbag Singh, 37, of no fixed abode, will stand trial at the court on April 2. All three remain in custody. Operation Blue Star was aimed at flushing out militants holed up in Sikhdom’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, demanding an independent Sikh homeland.Four months after the raid, Indira 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.