In an interview with Reuters, Satinder Pal Singh Raju, of Woodland, California, said FBI agents on Thursday came to speak with him and a friend who was driving the truck when they and another passenger were attacked on Interstate 505 South in Yolo County on their way back from a late dinner in Vacaville.

Nijjar was killed in June 2023 outside his gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. That killing, and Trudeau’s suggestion of possible Indian government involvement, triggered a diplomatic crisis between the countries.

Speaking through an interpreter, Raju said a white car pulled up to the left of their truck, then fell back behind them before pulling up alongside them again. That was when the first bullet was fired.

“With the first shot, I ducked down,” he said. “But then I heard more gunshots fired.”

As they attempted to escape the gunfire, their truck skidded and veered off the road into a ditch, said Raju. He and his two friends fled into a nearby field and hid behind a haystack while they called 911. Police officers later told him they located at least five shell casings.

The FBI’s Sacramento office confirmed it is collaborating with the California Highway Patrol “in support of the investigation” into the shooting.

A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol confirmed the shooting occurred, but declined to provide details and said the investigation is ongoing.

In the same month as Nijjar’s killing, the FBI foiled an alleged assassination attempt against Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, another prominent Sikh separatist with dual citizenship in Canada and the United States. Pannun is general counsel for Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), a banned outfit in India.

The US Justice Department has charged Indian national Nikhil Gupta with trying to arrange Pannun’s murder at the behest of an Indian intelligence official.

Gupta pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial in New York.

Four Indian nationals in Canada are facing charges of murder and conspiracy in the death of Nijjar.

India has denied involvement in both incidents, and it was not clear if there is a connection between the drive-by shooting involving Raju and those earlier incidents.

The Indian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on Friday about the recent shooting in California.

In the days and months after Nijjar’s killing, the FBI and the Canadian Royal Mounted Police privately warned at least seven Sikh activists that their lives could be in grave danger, without specifying the source of the threat.

Raju told Reuters he was not among those who received such calls. Raju is involved with SFJ, an advocacy group co-founded by Pannun that organises non-binding referendums around the world to urge Punjab to secede from India and carve out an independent state called Khalistan.

The movement led to a violent insurgency in India’s Punjab state in the 1980s and 1990s.

The August 11 shooting occurred two weeks after Raju had returned from Calgary, Canada, where he helped organise a referendum that drew the participation of an estimated 55,000 members of the Sikh community, according to Pannun.

In 2019, India declared SFJ an unlawful association, citing its involvement in extremist activities. Pannun and its members deny these allegations.

Raju is not as well known as Pannun internationally, but he said he is active with organising referendums.

He said he does not have enemies, and suspects the shooting was motivated by a desire to stoke fear in those supporting the Khalistan movement. “…this attack on me and the death threats is not going to deter me from continuing the campaign,” he said.

Until recently, Satinder Pal Singh Raju was a mostly unknown figure in Northern California’s large and sprawling Sikh community.

From his home in the small city of Woodland, he worked as a trucker — a popular job for Sikhs — took care of his wife and kids and was a regular at Gurdwara Sahib West Sacramento, the temple where he’s prayed since emigrating from India nearly 19 years ago.

In his free time, he volunteered to travel Northern California and Canada to organize educational events and symbolic voting drives to establish a long-desired independent nation, Khalistan, that Sikh activists want to carve out of India’s Punjab region. India considers the decades-old global separatist movement to be a terrorist operation because of its territorial ambitions and violence committed by some of its offshoots.

On Aug. 11, when Raju was making a late-night food run with two friends, someone fired at his pickup truck as it traveled down Interstate 505 in rural Yolo County. At least four bullets struck his vehicle, police said. Raju and his friends — who are also Sikh activists involved in the separatist movement — were not injured, although their car veered off the road, coming to rest near a drainage ditch and a two-story stack of hay.

“They tried to kill me,” said Raju, 44.

In the last two weeks, news of the shooting has reverberated across Indian media and Punjabi-language radio shows in North America as fears grow among California Sikhs about recent threats against them because of their political activity in opposition to the right-wing, nationalist Indian government. In recent months, Sikh leaders at several temples across Northern California have reported anonymous calls and text messages that threaten them in Hindi for pro-Khalistan activities.

There has been debate in the Sikh community about whether the attack on Raju and his passengers could be linked to broader transnational incidents in Canada and the U.S. in which authorities have accused the Indian government of having links to the fatal shooting of a Sikh activist in British Columbia and a plot to kill another in New York.

India has denied all allegations.

Local law enforcement in Woodland and the California Highway Patrol, which responded to the 911 call, have not commented on the motivation for the shooting and publicly released information about it on Aug. 22, 10 days after the incident. In a statement, the FBI said it “continues to collaborate” with the CHP on an investigation and “takes all acts of violence seriously.” The Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not reply to questions from The Times.

Activists targeted

The Sikh Coalition, a U.S.-based civil rights group, said in a statement that the Yolo County incident, while under investigation, “underscores the continued threat of Indian transnational repression.”

The activists targeted in the Canada and New York cases were involved in a group called Sikhs for Justice. The organization promotes nonbinding referendum votes across the globe for the Sikh diaspora to express support for Khalistan, which means “land of the pure” in Punjabi. Voting events this year in Sacramento and San Francisco attracted tens of thousands of Sikhs.

In May, Canadian police arrested three Indian nationals residing in Alberta in connection with a June, 18, 2023, shooting that killed Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar — a close friend of Raju’s — as he stood outside his temple.

The three suspects — as well as a fourth alleged associate who was previously arrested — appeared in court this month on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The trial was delayed until October. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police — Canada’s national police force — did not disclose how it found the men. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said Canadian intelligence agencies were looking into “credible allegations” of possible Indian government involvement.

India has said that Canada has shared no evidence to back its allegations of government involvement. It instead accused Canada of giving “shelter” to extremists.

In November, the U.S. government alleged in a federal indictment that India paid a hit man — an undercover agent connected to the Drug Enforcement Agency, it turned out — to kill a Sikh activist in New York who is a lawyer and spokesman for Sikhs for Justice. In the indictment, the U.S. accused an unnamed Indian official of working with a known international narcotics trafficker to hire the fake hit man for $100,000. The trafficker was arrested in the Czech Republic and extradited in June to New York. He has pleaded not guilty in federal court ahead of a September trial.

India has said its investigation into U. S. charges found that “rogue” agents of the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s spy agency, were operating without government approval.

Sikhs vow to continue

Activists brush off the denials and said they remain unflinching in their commitment.

“They lie,” said Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and spokesman for Sikhs For Justice who has been promoting Raju’s case. Pannun is the New York resident that the U.S. government said India tried to kill.

“If a bullet and death is the price to pay for Khalistan, that is what we will face as Sikhs,” said Pannun, who produces YouTube shows from his Astoria, Queens, office where he rails against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He’s now turned his attention toward Raju, who has become somewhat of a hero in the tight-knit community of Sikhs who organize for Khalistan.

For Raju, the shooting has emboldened his activism.

“What more is there to but keep on going?” he said. “We can’t stop now. We can’t be scared.”

Not all of of his co-activists agree with Raju’s allegations of a possible Indian plot against him.

“We don’t really know what happened. It could be something else,” said Bobby Singh, a 24-year-old Khalistan organizer in Sacramento who said he knows Raju from local pro-Khalistan rallies. “Still, we demand a full investigation.”

Decades-long strife

Sikhs number about 500,000 in the U.S., the third-largest population outside of India after the United Kingdom and Canada. About half of U.S. Sikhs live in California, where their presence in the Bay Area, Stockton and Sacramento goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

While the most ardent activists for Khalistan, such as Raju, make up a small group, support for the movement is widespread among Sikhs in the United States. Posters and prayers at temples regularly cite the envisioned Sikh nation.

Many, like Raju, point to modern Indian history as the reason why.

Now 44, he was a young boy growing up in the Punjabi city of Jalandhar during a peak of strife between Sikhs and the Indian government.

In 1984, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a siege on separatists occupying the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism. In response, her two Sikh guards assassinated her. Mobs went rampage around Delhi, killing Sikhs, often with government approval. Some estimates put the deaths in the tens of thousands. In another incident a year later that was tied to the violence, militants blew up an Air India flight over the Atlantic, killing 329 people.

Raju has friends and family back home who saw the violence of that era, he said, and knows people in India who faced lingering discrimination against Sikhs over the decades.

That — and the opportunity to work and live in America — brought him California when he was 25. Raju moved in with family in Woodland and got a job in trucking. He briefly quit to run a Punjabi grocery store before returning to trucks a decade ago. For much of his working life, Raju has been on Interstate 5, hauling dry goods from California to Oregon and Washington state.

Growing activism

“I was not very political,” he said. That was until 2016, when friends from the West Sacramento temple recruited him to volunteer for Sikhs for Justice. The growing group had ambitions to launch voting drives for Khalistan across Sikh population centers from London to Australia.

Raju would be in charge of educating Sikhs about the process — a way to show global Sikh support for the nation they seek to establish — and helping with voting centers in California and Canada. In WhatsApp groups and in-person gatherings, he got to meet Sikh activists who crisscrossed the globe in support of the cause.

It was a part-time hobby until last year. That’s when his friend, Nijjar, was shot dead ahead of that region’s vote.

“I was mourning,” Raju said. He took time away from trucking to spend three months in Surrey, Canada, a suburb of Vancouver, to organize the voting referendum. When Sikhs came together in San Francisco in January for a Khalistan vote, Raju was there. He joined in Sacramento, too, when a vote took place in April. Raju was in Calgary, Canada, until voting there concluded last month.

Unlike some higher-profile activists, Raju never received threats. But he suspects that his increasing visibility through his travels, including photos where he posed with Nijjar, put him on the radar of those opposed to his work.

The night of the shooting

During the day on Aug. 11, he said, he was at home in Woodland with two friends from the Khalistan movement who are less involved than him and asked not to be identified out of fear for their safety. Raju had spent the day playing with his young children before talking late into the night with his associates.

Hungry, they got on the road to drive south on I-505 for Vacaville, where BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse was open until midnight, Raju said.

His friend was driving Raju’s Dodge Ram 1500. Raju was in the passenger seat and the other friend was in the back. About 11:30 p.m. they noticed a car, possibly a white Honda Civic, following them closely, Raju said.

The Honda pulled to the passenger side of the truck, Raju said, and someone — he didn’t see who it was — began shooting. The three friends ducked and the car rolled into a ditch. Raju said they got out and briefly hid behind bales of hay, still visible Thursday afternoon.

“I’m thankful I survived,” said Raju. “Our religion is one of peace. But we also have to fight for our rights. So we will keep on going.”

Kaleem reported from Los Angeles and Garrison from Woodland. Staff writer Richard Winton contributed reporting.

With minutes left before halftime in the California School for the Deaf in Riverside’s 2022 championship football game, Coach Keith Adams and his players had come from behind to gain a narrow lead — and pushed for more.

Quarterback Trevin Adams, the coach’s oldest son, threw a desperate pass downfield — and right into the arms of wide receiver Jory Valencia, his childhood best friend, who broke for the end zone.

Starting with that touchdown dash, the Cubs, having honed their chemistry and system of football-specific sign language over countless hours, began steamrolling their way into history as the first deaf football team in the state to be crowned champions.

“We showed that we’re not only equal to others,” Trevin, 19, says now of their 80-26 win. “We’re better.”

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After that first championship in their division, the Cubs, who play a mix of hearing and deaf teams, won a second in 2023 and have no intention of slowing down in the new season, which starts on Friday, Aug. 30.

“We’re here to keep that streak going, to honor that legacy,” says 17-year-old Kaden Adams, who stepped into the role of first-string quarterback since brother Trevin graduated.

Their wins turned the boys into community heroes — at one point, thousands packed the stands — and attracted a national spotlight. New York Times correspondent Thomas Fuller was so inspired, he gave up his job to document the Cubs’ rise in a new book, The Boys of Riverside, out now.

“It was so quintessentially American,” says Fuller, 54, of being struck by the team’s perseverance. “A team that had endured seven decades of losing seasons was now beating the pants off of all their opponents.”

It wasn’t always so. The school’s football program began in the 1950s but for decades was plagued by seasons of defeat — 51 in all. In nearly a dozen of those, the team did not win a game at all.

The losses were made more difficult by the discrimination athletes at the school sometimes faced from outsiders. (The Cubs were even mockingly accused of faking their deafness.)

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But the players say they shrugged off the ignorance. “Just because we can’t hear, it doesn’t mean anything,” Trevin says. “We’ll still crush you.”

Their turnaround began in summer of 2021, when the boys returned to school restless and seeking ways to reconnect with one another after the isolation of online classes and pandemic protocols.

“COVID made us realize what we were losing out on, and football is a good representation of what brings us together,” says Valencia, 19, a basketball-turned-football player who discovered that he excelled in catching high passes.

Riverside’s deaf community is tightly knit, and many of the Cubs players had grown up together. Coach Adams (who, like the other coaches, is also deaf) credits that bond for their success, along with rigorous training, a fleet-footed playing style and the unique ways in which their deafness makes them stronger.

“When you watch deaf players and coaches communicate with each other on the football field, you realize maybe hearing people have a disadvantage,” explains Fuller, describing the speed with which they trade thoughts via sign language. “They are not affected by noise, they can speak over distances. It’s fast; it’s efficient.”

The Cubs’ first big win was in late September 2021, when the Division II squad beat Division I Calvary Chapel in a nail-biting 66-57 win that proved their preparation was paying off. “That started waking people up,” Valencia, the wide receiver, says. “It was a shock for us too.”

As the Cubs notched more and more victories, their excitement and determination grew.

“Hearing people, they’ve had opportunities in the past. They’ll have opportunities in the future to get a championship. But for us, the future’s uncertain,” says Coach Adams. “These boys were eager to change hearing people’s perspectives and get the opportunity they deserve.”

In their first-ever championship game, in 2021, with more than 3,000 fans in attendance, the Cubs’ undefeated season ended with a 74-22 loss — and a tough lesson that sometimes the best things in life don’t come easy.

“That really showed us what we needed to improve on,” says offensive lineman Christian Jimenez, 18, a cocaptain who transferred to the school to connect with teammates on an all-deaf team.

Adds their coach: “After that first loss, they were thinking, ‘Not again. I’m not gonna lose again.’ ”

They hardly did. The summer of 2022 was spent in the weight room, and in the two seasons since, the Cubs lost just three times. With each victory, often by double-digit margins, they attracted more fans and earned the respect they knew they long deserved.

“That stoked a fire in others to finally take us seriously and become more motivated [to try to] beat Riverside,” says Trevin, then the team’s cocaptain and star player, who inherited his love of football from his dad.

The 2022 championship win — which capped an undefeated season — was not without hurdles. Receiver Felix Gonzales was sidelined with a shattered shinbone mid-season, Valencia played through severe pneumonia (“It was my last year; I didn’t want to miss out,” he says), and Jimenez competed in his final game with a brace, warned by doctors that a single hit to his broken leg could leave him unable to walk.

“I still had that hunger and that drive. I wanted to feel that for one last time,” he says. “I gave my heart. I gave my all to it, for the Cubs.”

A successive championship win in 2023 hasn’t slaked their thirst for a threepeat this fall. “It would be amazing,” says Coach Adams. “That’s very rare, even for a hearing team.”

While some of his star players have since moved on to college — Trevin, Jimenez and Valencia are now student athletes at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., following in their coach’s footsteps — Kaden and other Cubs seniors are looking forward to passing along their winning spirit to new teammates this season.

“I can already tell we have earned other teams’ respect, and they do see us as equals,” Kaden says. “I think we’re going to have a good year.”