NIA arrests Harwinder Kumar at Delhi airport after UAE deportation in VHP leader killing

The National Investigation Agency arrested Harwinder Kumar alias Sonu at Indira Gandhi International Airport on Thursday, 1 October 2026, after the United Arab Emirates deported him. The agency says he provided money and logistics for the killing of Vikas Prabhakar, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader in Punjab. Officers took him into custody on arrival and were to produce him before the special NIA court.

The case is registered as RC-06/2024/NIA/DLI. The NIA took it over on 9 May 2024 and has already filed three chargesheets. Its account of the plot names two men in Germany, Harjit Singh alias Laddi and Kulbeer Singh alias Sidhu, as Babbar Khalsa International operatives who allegedly planned the killing. Harwinder Kumar, son of Chaman Lal and listed as accused A-7, is described as the man who, while based in the UAE, moved funds and support to those operatives. BKI is a proscribed organisation under Indian law. The agency note calls his role that of logistics provider and financer.

Deportation is the step that changed the file. An accused in the Gulf can be named in a chargesheet and still stay out of an Indian courtroom. Thursday's arrival at IGI, followed by the arrest, puts A-7 inside the special court's jurisdiction. The NIA described the deportation as the result of diplomatic work with the Emirates. It did not publish the date he was detained there, or the charge the Emirati authorities used to hold him. Those details usually appear in the remand papers rather than the first agency note.

Three chargesheets already on the record mean the agency has set out its case against other accused without him in the dock. His arrest lets prosecutors put the alleged financier beside the men they say carried out the attack, and lets the court test the Germany-to-UAE-to-Punjab chain. A special-court remand will decide whether he is held in Delhi or moved toward the Punjab end of the investigation. The agency said only that he would be produced for further legal proceedings.

The killing was investigated as a targeted attack linked to BKI, which is why the NIA, rather than the Punjab police alone, holds the file. Cases of this type stand or fall on money trails, travel records and messages. Kumar's phones and accounts, if they were seized on arrival or obtained through the Emirati handover, are the material the next filing will have to use. The agency has not said what was recovered at the airport, or whether a formal mutual-legal-assistance request produced bank records before the flight landed.

The chargesheet count is a useful clock. Three filings since May 2024 means the NIA has been adding accused and evidence in stages, a pattern it uses when some of the named men are outside India. A-7 was the missing Gulf end of that chain. With him in custody, the open questions are practical: which prison or NIA facility holds him tonight, whether the special court grants police custody for interrogation, and whether a fourth chargesheet follows with the UAE material attached.

What Thursday established is already usable. A named accused, previously described as UAE-based, is in NIA custody at Delhi. The case number, the three existing chargesheets, the alleged planners in Germany, and the alleged role, logistics and finance for a BKI plot, are on the public record of the agency. The special court is the next room he enters, and the remand order from that room will show whether the deportation has given investigators time with him or only a defendant in judicial custody.