Your Singhs today (Brampton edition)

It's been a slow day for political news, what with everyone catching their breath following President Trump's announcement of "revenge tariffs" of 10%... wait, 15% on the entire world. But there's always crime news, and you can find it by Googling "Singh+Surrey" or "Singh+Brampton". 

The second option led us to a report from the Peel Regional Police, as follows: 

Investigators from the 22 Division Criminal Investigations Bureau (CIB) have siezed a firearm following a kidnapping investigation where search warrants were executed in the Brampton area. On Nov. 6, 2025, at approximately 6 p.m., the complainant contacted police to advise that a close friend of his had been kidnapped. The accused demanded $200,000 from the complainant stating that if he did not provide the payment they would harm the victim. 

Through diligent police work and investigative techniques, the victim was safely located and found to be unharmed. One accused was arrested at the scene, where a .45-calibre firearm was recovered. On Feb. 13, 2026, two Criminal Code Search Warrants were executed in Brampton. Further evidence of the offence was located at the scene. One loaded firearm magazine and an unloaded rifle magazine was also located. 

Harkirat Singh, a 27-year-old from Brampton [not the Brampton city councillor of the same name]  was charged with the following: 

Kidnapping while Using Firearm

Knowledge of Unauthorized Possession of Firearm

Occupant of Motor Vehicle Knowing there was Firearm 

Possession of a Loaded Prohibited or Restricted Firearm.

Amritpal Singh, a 27-year-old from Brampton was charged with the following: 

Kidnapping while Using Firearm 

Knowledge of Unauthorized Possession of Firearm 

Occupant of Motor Vehicle Knowing there was Firearm 

Possession of a Loaded Prohibited or Restricted Firearm 

Possession of a Prohibited Device or Ammunition Knowing its Possession is Unauthorized.

An arrest warrant has been issued for: Hasanpreet Singh, 28- years old of no fixed address will be charged with the following: 

Kidnapping while Using Firearm

Knowledge of Unauthorized Possession of Firearm

Occupant of Motor Vehicle Knowing there was Firearm

Possession of a Loaded Prohibited or Restricted Firearm 

What about them mugshots then? Which Singh is which?

Glad you asked, but unfortunately we can't give you a definitive answer. Ed. scraped them from a Canadian Press story published by Global TV News 26/8/21 under the headline "Police arrest 3 men in Brampton, searching for 4th suspect in human trafficking investigation".

The report says that "Amritpal Singh, who is 23, and 22-year-old Harkuwar Singh both face eight charges, including procuring and trafficking a person under the age of 18, forcible confinement and aggravated assault. Twenty-three-year-old Sukhmanpreet Singh is charged with forcible confinement and aggravated assault."

Maddeningly, the write-up doesn't tell us which of the three alleged Sikh criminals is which. But checking the math, Amritpal Singh was 23 in 2021, soooo... 27 in 2026 sounds about right. The Amritpal Singh arrested in 2021 is most likely one and the same as the Amritpal Singh arrested last week. 

What we have yet to learn is what happened to Mr Singh between August of 2021 and this winter. Was he brought to trial on the 2021 charges? Was he convicted? Did he do time? And after that was he deported as is supposed to happen in the case of any non-citizen of Canada sentenced to more than 6 months? Or did he claim asylum or refugee status so as to remain in Canada until whenever...

Interesting questions. Don't hold your breath waiting for answers.

"Naked Nisku" kidnappers under influence of "trippy tea"?

Walt promised to keep you posted on the bizarre case of the five naked kidnappers (the kidnapping is alleged, the nudity is not) arrested in the wilds of northern Alberta, Canada, earlier this week. Here's an update of our initial post, "5 naked people arrested in Alberta car crash", WWW 6/11/17.

What is clear is that five people -- one man and four women, three adults and two youths -- were found naked in a car following a crash on a rural road near Nisku, south of Edmonton AB. Three other people, barefoot but otherwise clothed, were also at the scene, having been picked up by the driver of a pickup truck (of course) who thought they needed help. (Duh!)

What is not clear is whether the pickup truck hit the BMW full of naked people, or the other way around. Even more of a mystery is what caused the five naked people to abduct the other three from their nearby home and take them for a ride. Charges of kidnapping have been laid by the RCMP, but no conviction is possible without proof of mens rea -- "the guilty mind", or criminal intent. So the question arises: What were they thinking??!!

A relative, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the minors (who have been released without charge) thinks he's got it figured out. He reckons that the Naked Nisku gang may have "unknowingly" drunk some hallucinogenic tea over breakfast! "It's absolutely crazy," said the relative. "It’s a scary thought thinking, 'Oh, let's try this tea that we purchased,' and then all sit down thinking they're just going to have a nice morning and end up in that circumstance."

The relative said he wants everyone to know the accused are not bad people. They just had some trippy tea. He said his two daughters, who are 13 and 15, and his ex-wife were having breakfast with two friends -- a man and his wife. The man had recently travelled overseas and brought back some tea from India. The relative did not know the name of the tea, which he said "kicked off the whole crazy spell."

The Mounties' version of the story is that a man, woman and baby were forced against their will from a home in Leduc County into a BMW. Inside the car were five naked people. While the car was being driven, the abducted man, who was in the trunk, managed to escape. The woman and her baby then managed to get away. The trio were picked up by a passerby, but his work truck was rammed from behind by the car. When officers arrived, they pulled out the five naked people. The adults, who were 27, 30 and 35, were arrested, but two teenaged girls were not charged.

The 35-year-old woman, who had already been released from custody, made a first appearance Thursday in Leduc court. She is charged with two counts of kidnapping, mischief damaging property over $5,000 and resisting a peace officer. The 30-year-old woman has been charged with three counts of kidnapping and one count of resisting a peace officer. The 27-year-old man, her husband, faces the same charges.

The relative said he laughed about the case when he heard it on the news, then was shocked to learn that his straight-laced daughters were involved. "I was just like, what the heck?" He visited his youngest girl in hospital, where she had been taken with some of the other suspects for treatment. They don't remember what happened, the man said. "Whatever potency that stuff had obviously is making it so it’s just a big blur," he said, adding blood tests were also taken at the hospital. "“Nothing came back like illicit drugs, so they figure it may have been some type of herbal drug or something."

He said the three people who were forced from their homes are also family friends and aren't holding any grudges. They probably opened their door that morning trying to help, he suggested. He also believes their car rammed the truck because the tea made those inside think the family had been abducted by the truck driver, not the other way around. "They were under the impression that they were saving that guy and the woman and the little girl."

Another plot twist was revealed today by Global News, from whom we got the original story. In spite of charges now being before the court, the abductees want to talk. In "Alberta family abducted by naked kidnappers frightened and baffled", they are quoted as telling Canadian Press they know the accused as neighbours, on top of which they are all members of the same Jehovah's Witnesses church. Curiouser and curiouser!

VIDEO UPDATE: 5 naked people arrested in Alberta car crash

Note from Ed.: I adapted the following story from an article with the same headline on the Global News website. I hope Global won't mind. There was nothing I or Walt could add that would make it any better, except maybe for a picture... Oh c'mon, you didn't really expect a photo, did you?

UPDATE ADDED 8/11/17 - We still don't have photos, but we do have VIDEO (albeit with the naughty bits blurred out...damn!) from a CTV newscast. Here 'tis. Turns out there's more to the story too. See update below the video.

Five people, who were not wearing any clothes, have been arrested following a two-vehicle crash in Nisku, Alberta, on Monday. The RCMP said it happened on Township Road 510 at around 9:45 a.m. Nisku is about a 30-minute drive south of Edmonton.

Sergeant Knacker of the Mounties said four women and one lucky man, all from one of the vehicles and all naked at the time, were taken to hospital and are in police custody. At the time of the crash, the temperature was about -8 C (about 18 F) in Nisku.

The Leduc general investigation section, forensic identification section, criminal collision investigation team and the collision analyst were all working on the file.

The Mounties said the investigation was "convoluted" and still in its infancy. However, they believe the collision was not accidental, and that drugs and alcohol could be factors in the collision.

UPDATE ADDED 8/11/17 - In a statement on Tuesday, the Mounties said three people -- a man, a woman and a newborn baby -- were forced from a home in Leduc County and into a vehicle. The man was stuffed into the vehicle’s trunk but somehow managed to escape. The woman and infant also managed to flee. That's when a truck driver passing through the area spotted the three and picked them up.

Derek Scott of LPH Industrial, speaking in the video, says it was his employee who came to their rescue. After they got into the truck, RCMP said another vehicle purposefully rammed the truck. The force of the collision pushed the truck into a ditch. The horsemen arrested five suspects: a man, two women and two female minors. All five were naked when they were taken in to custody. Kidnapping charges are pending against the three adults, RCMP said. The two youths have since been released.

The thick plottens! What kind of people go on a kidnapping mission naked in below freezing weather? Would Canadians do that? Errr, maybe... but let's not jump to contusions. Walt will bring you the bare facts when all is revealed in court!

African terrorists kidnapping schoolkids - 1973 version

In "Nigerian schoolgirls: we've seen this movie before -- literally!", I said the saga of the kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls by Boko Haram -- did I mention they're militant Islamists? -- reminded me of an incident depicted in The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Agent 3, who lived in that part of the world for some years, tells me I could have done much better. The plot of the 1980 movie, he says, drew heavily on an actual kidnapping on the night of 5 July 1973. ZANLA terrorists fighting for the "liberation" of Rhodesia abducted 292
people -- almost the same number as were taken in Nigeria -- mainly children, from St. Albert’s Mission near Centenary.

Click here to read the Wikipedia article on the Rhodesian Bush War. Under what the black terrorists called the "white settler regime", Rhodesia was the second-most prosperous country in sub-Saharan Africa, after the Republic of South Africa, which coincidentally was also run by the white minority. Many Rhodesians were concerned that "majority rule" would bring chaos, as resulted when the Belgian Congo was decolonized in 1960.

The Bush War involved counter-insurgency operations by the Rhodesian Security Forces against two rival terrorist gangs, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA). In July 1973, ZANLA cadres, trained and supported by the Maoist Frelimo forces in Mozambique, attacked the school at St. Albert's Mission between Centenary and Mount Darwin in July 1973 and abducted 292 pupils and staff, whom they force-marched north into the Zambezi valley towards their base in Mozambique. This true story is almost exactly that told in The Gods Must be Crazy.

The terrorists were intercepted by the Rhodesian Security Forces, albeit without the assistance of the movie's bumbling but brave biologist. All but eight of the children and staff were recovered. Similar abductions were repeated over the following years and the security forces found themselves increasingly unable to prevent them.

The captured schoolchildren would be marched to ZANLA bases in Mozambique where they would undergo "political 're-education'" and guerrilla training. No mention is made of the girls being forced into marriage with the guerrillas, or worse, but unlike in Nigeria, the ZANLA terrorists were not Islamic fundamentalists.

Further reading: The St. Albert's Mission kidnapping is mentioned along with other incidents which occurred in Rhodesia in the months of July, 1890 through 1978, in the July 2013 edition of Contact! Contact!, a publication of the Rhodesian Services Association Inc. The online newsletter has all kinds of interesting factoids, photos, and Rhodie stuff for sale, so if you (like Agent 3) have some connection with the great country that has now become the far-from-great Zimbabwe, check it out.

Nigerian schoolgirls: we've seen this movie before -- literally!

Boko Haram, the fanatical Muslim militants who kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls a few days ago, have released a new video showing most of the girls are still alive. According to their captors, the girls are being well looked after and have converted to Islam. And they will be released, the thugs say, in exchange for prisoners being held by the Nigerian government.

Walt wonders why no-one has yet made the connection between the tragicomedy unfolding in Nigeria this month and the 1980 movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, a South African production starring Jamie Uys, the stunning Sandra Prinsloo and the little Bushman, N!xau, who plays the real hero of the story.

Since the IMDb plot summary misses half the story, Walt will explain the rest of it, and how it relates to the kidnappings in Nigeria.

The action takes place in the Kalahari desert, in Botswana, as Xi -- the Bushman played by N!xau -- encounters technology for the first time, in the shape of a Coke bottle thrown out of a passing plane. He takes it back to his people, who start to fight over it, so he decides to walk to the end of the earth to give it back to the gods who sent it.

On his trek, he meets Andrew Steyn (Uys) a shy and bumbling biologist (first seen analyzing elephant shit), who has himself just met and fallen for Kate Thompson (Prinsloo), who has come from the big modern city to the native village to teach school.

Meanwhile, in an unnamed neighbouring country [Agent 3 says it's meant to Angola. Ed.], a fanatical revolutionary has failed to overthrow the black dictator, and is fleeing to Botswana ahead of the dictator's incompetent security forces. In Botswana, the fanatic and his stupid and thuggish followers kidnap Miss Thompson's class of schoolgirls (and schoolboys), whom they force to march into the bush as hostages. Does this not sound familiar? Today, in Nigeria, life is imitating art!

"How does it all turn out?", I hear you ask. Well... Steyn and Mpudi (the coloured comic relief sidekick) and Xi cross paths, quite by accident, with Sam Boga and the kidnapped kids. They overpower the kidnappers using stupefying medicine -- Steyn is a biologist, remember -- and free the kids (and the lovely Miss Thompson), just as the Botswana police, led by a handsome white safari-leader, arrive to mop up. No-one is hurt and everyone is happy, including Xi, who eventually reaches the end of the earth and throws the Coke bottle over the edge.

Why has no-one drawn the parallel with this month's events in Nigeria? Could it be because The Gods Must Be Crazy was roundly denounced, from the day of its release, as being not just politically incorrect but frankly racist. The thuggish revolutionaries are black, cruel and incompetent -- just like Boko Haram. The Bushmen (so called in the movie although "San" or "Sho" are the PC terms) are shown as primitive and childlike -- which they were until very recently. The whities are portrayed as the only ones smart and brave enough to sort the problem out peacefully.

In short... whites civilized, blacks uncivilized. Well... sorry, my PC friends, but that's how Africa was at the time. Has it changed appreciably? Errr, no.

The Gods Must Be Crazy is very funny -- even if you're non-white -- well, and worth seeing. However, as sequels usually do, The Gods Must Be Crazy II sucks.

Further reading on WWW: "The kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls and the Mirror Image Fallacy" and "'Slacktivism' -- idle, impotent and irrelevant"

"Slacktivism" -- idle, impotent and irrelevant

Malala's doing it. Hellery Clinton's doing it. Michelle Obama's doing it.

Everybody's doing it. Except Walt. [And Ed. Ed.]

What's "it"? Why tweeting #BringBackOurGirls of course! The reference is to the dastardly kidnapping of close to 300 Nigerian schoolgirls by the Boko Haram.

These guys are Islamic extremists by the way. Walt points that out because the PC media, politicians and pundits seem incapable of saying the words "Islamists" or "Muslims" in referring to these terrorists. Even the CBC's Rex Murphy -- usually a straight shooter -- got through his 5-minute piece on The National on Thursday without once alluding to the religion which Boko Haram claim inspires them.

But I digress. Most of the girls are still "missing", with the Nigerian authorities professing to have no idea where to look for them. Nigeria's head nagger, Goodluck Jonathan, has appeared on TV begging for technology, weapons and, errr, money to help his army rescue the girls. He said nothing about returning the weapons, jeeps or whatever once the girls are found.

Meanwhile, all right-thinking people agree that, yes, Boko Haram are a bad lot, and shouldn't sell the girls into slavery, prostitution and/or marriage. Hence the hashtag. It has become fashionable, in the last couple of days, to scrawl the hashtag on a piece of cardboard, take a picture of yourself holding it, and post it in the social media, which Walt thinks ought to be called the "anti-social media".

Twittering, tweeting, retweeting... whatever you call taking the "action" just described is, you see, Doing Something. Posting a picture of yourself displaying #BringBackOurGirls shows support for them, you see. One cam imagine them seeing all the tweets on their iPhones, somewhere in the middle of the African bush, and being encouraged.

And who knows? Maybe the thugs who call themselves Boko Haram will see that 1000s of people have the courage to put these pictures online, and be motivated by compassion or fear to do what the hashtag commands. But Walt doubts it. For one thing, these Muslim terrorists -- don't forget it! -- don't look very literate. If they can read Hausa, which is written in Arabic script. Seeing signs in English -- the language of "boko" (= "book", = western/Christian education and culture) probably provokes them to fits of anger and/or laughter.

Tweeting #BringBackOurGirls or anything other expression of your "thoughts" on this or any other subject is a weak and futile gesture. It's like adding a few flowers -- possibly accompanied by a teddy bear -- to one of those "memorials" that spring up at the site of an accident or a crime.

You may think you're Doing Something when you tweet or twitter or throw more garbage on the heap, but really you're guilty of "slacktivism" -- making a small, meaningless gesture to show that you "care" and ease your guilty conscience. Why you or Michelle Obama should feel guilty about something which you had nothing to do with, and which has nothing to do with you, is another matter. But if you really want to help, find a better way.

"Like what?", I hear you ask. That's a toughie, but perhaps a donation to an organization like Amnesty International, or a reputable NGO working to educate girls in the third world, would do some good. Meanwhile, please spare us the vapid and ultimately useless tweets.

Further reading on WWW: "The kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls and the Mirror Image Fallacy"

The kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls and the Mirror Image Fallacy

BREAKING NEWS: "8 more Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by suspected Boko Haram gunmen"

In case you've been on another planet, the last three weeks have seen a horror story emerge from Africa -- where else -- that has provoked more than the usual amount of international interest and indignation. Some 230 girls in their mid-teens were kidnapped from their school in the state of Borno, in northern Nigeria. This happened on April 14th and none of the girls has been seen since.

Reports last week said that some of the girls were taken across borders into Cameroon and Chad. Others are said to have been forced to "marry" their abductors, who paid a nominal bride price of $12. Paying a bride price is still customary in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, although the girl's worth is nowadays calculated in cash rather than cattle.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has said everything was being done to find the girls. Walt wishes him good luck [Geddit? Ed.] and will help by explaining who took the girls and why. Here's a CNN video that makes things pretty clear. [No. Clear, but not pretty. Ed.]



CNN and the rest of the lamestream media make it clear enough that the schoolgirls were taken by Boko Haram. The CNN reporter describes them as "jihadists". What that means -- and what the politically correct western media almost never spell out -- is that Boko Haram are Islamic extremists. Fanatically militant Muslims!

Walt has written about Boko Haram before. See "Nigerian archbishop says Boko Haram fanaticism increasing" and "Islamic extremists don't discriminate; they kill anyone and everyone".

Boko Haram, which means "Western education is forbidden", has attacked schools, churches, bus stations, anything and everything, all over the predominantly Muslim northern part of Nigeria. In a video circulating on the Net today, one of their leaders, Abubakar Shekau, said the girls should not have been in school in the first place, but rather should get married. "God instructed me to sell them," he said. "They are his properties and I will carry out his instructions!"

The other reason the lamestream media are downplaying the Islamic extremist angle is that these fanatics happen to be, errr, African -- as black as the ace of spades. So when attention is called to their race and their religion, it agitates the liberal one-worlders who believe that we are really all the same inside. To do so offends their naive notions about the Brotherhood of Man [and Woman? Ed.]

To aver that people are people, undifferentiated by race, religion, language and culture, is absurd. It is the Mirror Image Fallacy, writ large. The mirror image fallacy is the wrongly assumed belief that others share our thoughts, responses, and perspectives. That is just not so. The Islamic fundamentalists are nothing like us.

So when America and Britain offer to "help", to "facilitate" or "mediate" or somehow make a connection between Boko Haram and civilized people, they are committing what Charles Krauthammer called a "plural solipsism". In "The Mirror-Image Fallacy", penned for Time way back in 1983, Mr. Krauthammer concluded "To gloss over contradictory interests, incompatible ideologies and opposing cultures as sources of conflict is more than anti-political. It is dangerous."

Further reading: "The Mirror-Image Fallacy" is included in Charles Krauthammer's new book, Things That Matter (Crown Forum 2013),a collection of 88 of his columns spanning three decades. You'll find a review and some excerpts in "The Insights of Charles Krauthammer", by Lauri B. Regan on The American Thinker website.