POLICE FEAR INNOCENT COULD SUFFER IN GANG WARS

Les Bazso, The Province / Vancouver police leave the crime scene yesterday
where they are investigating a drive-by shooting in the 1200-block East
59th Ave.

Police from around the Lower Mainland will meet next week to deal with
escalating gang wars.

"We certainly do have an escalation at this point," Vancouver police
spokesman Det. Scott Driemel said yesterday.

"This is our biggest fear -- that somebody who is innocent might end up
getting injured or killed."

Driemel said police are trying to track the violence, which has spread to
both the tight-knit and relatively small Indo-Canadian and Vietnamese
communities.

A drive-by shooting early yesterday in the 1200-block of East 59th Avenue
is the latest in a series of attacks -- including two murders and several
serious injuries.

The shooting was the second in two weeks at the home of Ravinder Soomel, a
21-year-old facing trial in what police say was the drug-related murder
last year of Gurpreet Singh Sohi.

Simon Fraser University criminologist Rob Gordon said similar outbreaks of
violence in the past have indicated turf wars --Eusually for control of the
Lower Mainland's lucrative drug trade.

"My understanding of what's going on here is not so much street gangs in
the North American sense, but more disputes between individual criminal
groups," said Gordon, who has studied Lower Mainland gangs extensively.
"These guys are in business and they're involved primarily in the
distribution of narcotics."

Last week, an Indo-Canadian male was killed and another wounded in an
attack at an East Vancouver barber shop. The wounded man was alleged to
have been an associate of Bindy Johal, a local gangster murdered in 1998.