Who is the Canadian blogger who accepted ‘significant money’ from fugitive Ryan Wedding?

A Canadian crime blogger accused of helping fugitive Ryan Wedding set up the killing of an FBI informant told CBC News earlier this year he was given “a significant amount of money” to stay silent on the case.

Gursewak Singh Bal, of Mississauga, Ont., is now facing multiple charges in the United States, including conspiracy to commit murder in connection with a continuing criminal enterprise.

Bal, 31, was named in the sprawling federal grand jury indictment unsealed on Wednesday, as the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI announced further arrests in connection with Wedding’s alleged transnational drug-smuggling network.

According to the indictment, Bal ran the “Canadian urban news outlet” known as the Dirty News. Before the site was taken down at the request of U.S. authorities this week, it routinely featured descriptions and photos of crime scenes and profiles of crime figures.

U.S. prosecutors accuse Bal of accepting a $10,000 payment from a Wedding associate to post a photo of a key FBI witness “so that enterprise members and associates could locate and kill” him.

The indictment also alleges that Bal agreed to keep quiet about Wedding — a former Team Canada Olympic snowboarder now listed as one of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives — and his network’s second-in-command, fellow Canadian Andrew Clark.

U.S. and Canadian authorities accuse Wedding of running a $1-billion US criminal enterprise that uses transport trucks to routinely ship tonnes of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl across North America.

A CBC News reporter contacted the Dirty News in June after the site’s X account — which has also been taken down — posted a short video showing stacks of Canadian $20 and $50 bills and a bottle of champagne, with the caption: “Ryan James Wedding aka SnowBoarder pays his TPs really well.”

“TP” is the acronym used in U.S. court documents to refer to Canadian drug transportation networks — in other words, the truckers paid to smuggle cocaine.

“There’s a reason why it’s so easy for [SnowBoarder] to employ new drivers and truckers,” the social media post said.

The person operating the email account for the Dirty News told CBC News in June: “Long story short, we got a significant amount of money from [SnowBoarder] and his guys to keep quiet about a few things.”

“Turns out that he ended up becoming the biggest thing on the news, and therefore we were essentially allowed to publish whatever…. Still been quiet about it all. But we will be posting our story this week, and it’s basically just a transcript of the conversation we had with his team.”

The story was never published.

Instead, Bal is now considered a “member and associate of the Wedding Criminal Enterprise,” according to the indictment.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Wedding used the Dirty News “to post photographs of the witness and his wife in order to locate him, which ultimately succeeded.”

The witness is identified in the indictment only as “Victim A,” but Ontario court documents filed earlier this year suggest he was Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, a Canadian-Colombian drug trafficker who was in a Texas prison at the same time as Wedding.

As a co-operating witness, he agreed in December 2023 to assist the FBI in its takedown of Wedding’s network. Court records show the informant later helped investigators infiltrate the drug ring’s encrypted chats and secret meetings.

According to the indictment, Bal posted on Instagram a photo of “Victim A” on Nov. 5, 2024, with the caption, “this guy single handedly (ratted) out one of the strongest underworld networks that this (world) has seen.”

“Good chance he’ll never be found again.”

Less than three months later, Acebedo-Garcia was shot in the head five times in a restaurant in Medellin, Colombia.

Court documents filed this week in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and reviewed by CBC News show that an undercover RCMP officer reached out to Bal via Instagram in August as part of the investigation. The officer claimed he was “trying to locate a ‘rat’” and needed Bal’s help.

According to the court filing, Bal later revealed that the $10,000 payment from Wedding’s network was sent to him in cryptocurrency. Bal purportedly told the officer he would charge the officer “5-6 bills” to “find someone” but that it would cost more if he was “trying to like get [someone] blasted.”

Although Andrew Clark was arrested last year in Mexico, a timeline included in the indictment suggests he was receiving updates on the assassination while in custody.

Bal and six other alleged Wedding associates in Canada were arrested this week and all face extradition to the U.S. Bal has not responded to the allegations in court.