Indian-origin teens shot dead in Canada

Vancouver: Two Indo-Canadian teenage boys were killed in gang-style violence at Abbotsford near Vancouver on Friday. Abbotsford is home to one of the largest Punjabi communities in Canada.

Joseph Randay and Dilsher Gill, both 18, were reportedly kidnapped at gunpoint from a city park at dinner time on Thursday by a car-borne assailant, Amarjit Randay, father of the one of the slain teenagers, told the media. Their bodies were discovered inside the abandoned car on a rural road Friday.

Randay said his son Joseph and Gill were hanging out with their schoolmates in the park when the assailant pulled up to them. He said his son confronted the assailant when he tried to kidnap two other teenagers by pointing his gun at them.

"All we know is that they were kidnapped at gunpoint (last night) and now they have found their bodies. The police said they are both dead. Police have no leads,'' the grieving father was quoted as saying by the local media.

Both the teenagers were grade 12 students at the local W J Mouat Secondary School.

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Known for its oldest Sikh shrine of North America, which has been put on the heritage list by the Canadian government, Abbotsford lies almost on the US border. It is also known as the theft capital of Canada because of its high property crime rate.

Due to the free availability of marijuana, which is traded with cocaine in the US, many Indo-Canadian teenagers in the Vancouver have been sucked into drug gangs over the years.

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Shootings betweens these gangs have claimed the lives of more than 110 lives of Indo-Canadian young people since the mid-1990s. Most cases remained unsolved.

Though the provincial British Columbia government has set up a task force to stem the violence, it shows no signs of abating.