By IANS,
Toronto : Drug-related gang violence in the Indo-Canadian community, which was till now restricted to British Columbia province, seems to have spread to the Toronto area, claiming the life of a youth Tuesday.
Police identified the victim as 23-year-old Paramprit Dhindsa of Malton town on the outskirts of Toronto. Malton has a huge concentration of the immigrant Punjabi community. A college student, Dhindsa was shot dead while he was in his car waiting for his girlfriend.
Giving a sequence of events, police said two men walked up to Dhindsa’s car Tuesday evening and asked him to hand over drugs and money in his possession. When he refused, one of them shot him at point-blank range. Dhindsa died on the spot.
According to police, the assailants were black men.
Drug-related gang violence among the youth has plagued the Indo-Canadian community in this country for more than a decade. More than 100 young men have been killed in the drug gang violence since the mid-1990s in the Vancouver area alone, including the city of Surrey, in British Columbia province. Surprisingly, most of these deaths remain unresolved to this day.
The provincial government has earmarked millions of dollars and set up a task force to check the gang violence. However, the violence and killings continue unabated.
The major cause of the violence is the easy availability of marijuana in Canada which is traded with cocaine in the US through the cross-border smuggling.
The Indo-Canadian youths, who are easily lured into this lucrative trade by their peers, then fight and kill one another in turf wars.