MILWAUKEE, May 21 (UPI) -- An Indian official cannot be sued in a U.S. court over allegations he persecuted and killed Sikhs in India because a judge says he was never served the papers.
Parkash Singh Badal, an Indian politician and chief minister of Punjab, was in Milwaukee last year for the wedding of a friend's daughter that happened to be in the days after a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., was stormed by a gunman who killed six people and wounded four others before taking his own life.
Given the heightened tension, Badal's visit drew local media coverage.
A group called Sikhs for Justice attempted to file a lawsuit against Badal for allegedly overseeing the persecution, torture and killing of minority Sikhs in India, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said. Citing the federal Torture Victim Protection and Alien Tort laws, the group attempted to serve Badal with papers holding him to account in U.S. District Court for the alleged crimes in India.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman ruled Friday the lawsuit couldn't proceed because the man process servers said was Badal when they handed him the lawsuit documents was, in fact, another man with no ties to any suspected crimes against Sikhs in India.
Badal's lawyers said he was never in attendance Aug. 9 at the academic conference where the process servers said they handed him the paperwork. An interpreter at the event who said he was given the legal papers but didn't understand what they meant testified in court and produced the papers intended for Badal.
Sikhs for Justice members called the story a coverup by the U.S. government to avoid an embarrassing incident for a high-ranking Indian government official.
Adelman ruled Badal's legal team provided more than sufficient evidence to prove the process servers suffered a case of mistaken identity.
"In combination, [the defense] presented a mountain of evidence supporting defendant's version of the events of Aug. 9," Adelman wrote. "I have no doubt that [the process servers] ... sincerely believe that they served [the] defendant, but I conclude that they made an honest mistake, one that was understandable under the unusual circumstances of this case."
