Warrant issued for Brampton man involved in Pearson gold robbery

Peel Regional Police have issued an arrest warrant for a man in connection with this case gold robbery at Toronto Pearson airport after he failed to appear in court.

Prasath Paramalingam, 35, of Brampton, was charged with being an accessory after another in helping 25-year-old Durante King-McLean during an airport robbery in which King-McLean allegedly drove away with gold bars worth millions in April 2023.

On Thursday, a police spokesman confirmed to CityNews that an arrest warrant has been in force since August after Paramalingam failed to appear at his court date. A bench warrant results from the judge’s authority.

In April, PRP investigators confirmed that King-McLean and Paramalingam had been charged in the U.S. with conspiracy to engage in international firearms trafficking.

U.S. officials became involved in the case in September 2023, several months after the Pearson airport gold heist, when one of the suspects, identified as King-McLean, was stopped in Pennsylvania on suspicion of traffic violations.

Police determined that King-McLean, who fled the scene on foot, was in the country illegally. Responding officers searched his rental vehicle and found 65 firearms that were allegedly illegally smuggled into Canada. Two of the weapons were fully automatic and considered machine guns under federal law, and 11 of them were reported stolen.

U.S. investigators accused Paramalingam of arranging King-McLean’s illegal entry into the United States and arranging funds for him to purchase various firearms he obtained in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere. The U.S. attorney’s office later said Paramalingam was involved in the alleged firearms trade with King-McLean and had been conspiring with the defendant since April 2023, around the same time as the Pearson gold heist.

King-McLean is in police custody in the U.S. but is wanted across Canada on assault charges. Nationwide arrest warrants have also been issued for Simran Preet Panesar, 31, a former Air Canada employee who worked with the airline during the heist, Arsalan Chaudhary, 42, and Archit Grover, 36.

Police called it the largest gold theft in Canadian history.

The stolen gold and foreign currency were ordered from a refinery in Zurich, Switzerland, and transported in the fuselage of an Air Canada plane to Toronto. The gold and currency were later loaded onto the suspect’s truck after he presented a fake air waybill to warehouse workers, who loaded the shipment onto his truck.

Despite the arrests, most of the stolen gold remains unrecovered.