A car wash in Surrey is the latest business to be targeted with gunfire, and the owner says it came after recent extortion threats.
Gunfire shattered the windows of the 1313 Car Wash on 84 Avenue near 128 Street late Monday night.
The damage was discovered by Surrey officers patrolling the area around 11 p.m., and police say they are still working to determine a motive.
The car wash as closed and no workers were on site when the shooting happened, and the business was back open on Thursday.
Lovepreet Singh, who has owned the business for about two and a half years, said he’d received a call from an unknown number demanding $50,000 in the days before the incident.
“I just said I am related to a middle class family, I am not a millionaire or anything, I’m not giving $50,000 to you, if I had $50,000 I would put it towards my house, like the down payment,” he told Global News.
“There is two or three guys behind him on the phone, they are just yelling on me, abusing me.”
Singh said the night before the assault on his business, several armed men came to his home and were captured on CCTV.
Then, on Monday, a group of men broke into the car wash and spent the better part of an hour stealing $20,000 worth materials, including expensive equipment like a pressure washer and air compressor.
Before leaving they fired several bullets through the windows from inside the business.
“They were in the office and they didn’t care if there was someone going (by) in their car,” he said.
“Its a hard and scary time for me, and especially for my employees, you can see there are some girls working with me, so their families and everything are just worried for their safety, for my safety.”
The attack resembles a spate of extortion attempts recorded across the Lower Mainland, along with communities in Alberta and Ontario, often targeting South Asian business owners.
Last month, Global News reported that the number of active extortion investigations in Surrey had nearly tripled since the start of June, though police attributed that jump, in part, to more people coming forward.
However, Gurpreet Singh Johal, a criminology instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, said the number of actual threats may be far higher.
“That’s just the cases that the police are aware of. How many cases, how many experiences have the people had of victimization where they had to deal with this privately? They paid off the people, they didn’t want the public to know about it,” he said.
“They don’t want harm to come to them, to their family members, to themselves, but then also the possibility of them losing their insurance and all these other kind of ramifications if other institutions find out that this is happening to them.”
On Wednesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he would push in the coming fall session of Parliament for tougher penalties for accused extortionists.
“We are calling for jail and not bail. By repealing Liberal law C-75 and Liberal law C-5 we will make sure offenders that engage in extortion to jail, they are not automatically released again through the revolving door,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre has also joined B.C. Premier David Eby and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, along with the mayors of Surrey and Brampton, in calling for the Lawrence Bishnoi gang to be listed as a terrorist entity.
The gang, based in India, has been accused of links to extortion campaigns, along with other acts of transnational crime and repression, including the murder of Surrey gurdwara president Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Johal said that approach has benefits, but comes with challenges of its own.
“Designating them as a terrorist group allows for the freezing of assets and going after people who are connected to the people here,” he said.
“The other thing that’s about specifically about the Bishnoi gang — does it have connections to the Indian government? And then that becomes a lot more trickier, because now all of a sudden organized crime has to deal with political crime, and it’s much harder to go after.”
In July, the RCMP announced it had arrested two Surrey residents connection with firearms, arson and extortion-related offences, but no one has been charged.