Armed Intruders Destroy Sikh Temple’s Alarm System : North Hollywood: Masked men spoke Punjabi, witnesses say. They cause $14,000 in damage.

Three masked men, two armed with guns, forced their way into a Sikh temple in North Hollywood early Monday morning and held two church members at gunpoint as they destroyed a $14,000 security system and vandalized the temple’s telephones, church members and police said.

“This is the first time this has happened in a temple by a Sikh group,” said Gursharan Singh Nat, treasurer of the Sikh Gurdwara of Los Angeles, on Lankershim Boulevard. “The whole community is shocked.”

The gunmen knocked on the temple’s front door about 1 a.m. and forced a church member to take them to a priest, whom they asked for by name, Nat said. One of the masked men then put a gun to the head of Sucha Singh, one of three priests at the temple, and forced him to hand over keys to a room containing the temple’s security system. It was installed just two weeks ago, Nat said.

Singh and the other church member were ordered to stay in a back room while their assailants damaged a television monitor, tape player and a video recorder. The vandals also ripped out five video cameras throughout the church and cut wires to three telephones, Nat said.

“They knew exactly what they were doing,” he said.

Nat said that before fleeing the temple, the gunmen shouted a threat at Singh. “They said, ‘Tell your management committee president that we’ll be back to take care of you,’ ” Nat said. Both church members were uninjured, police said.

Nat and other Sikh members said the masked men spoke Punjabi during the attack. Nat said he suspects that the assailants are part of a violent Sikh youth group, which employs terrorist tactics in its efforts to have the state of Punjab established as a Sikh homeland in India.

In the past, members of that group had criticized security as incompatible with a church environment and voiced a desire to wrest financial control of the church from its current leaders, officials said.

The decade-old battle to make Punjab into a separate Sikh nation claimed more than 5,800 lives in 1991 alone. It has been a battle marked by guerrilla warfare, killings, kidnaping, extortion and police corruption in Punjab. Sikhs belong to a 500-year-old sect founded as a compromise between Hinduism and Islam, and last year composed about 60% of the population in Punjab state.

A Los Angeles police detective, who said the incident did not appear to be a hate crime, declined to comment further on the case Monday, pending a full investigation. Nat said that there are nine Sikh temples in Los Angeles County, and that his temple boasts a 1,000-member congregation, with about 100 active members. He estimated that there are 500 Sikh families living in the San Fernando Valley.

According to information compiled from the 1990 U. S. Census, there are an estimated 43,828 natives of India living in Los Angeles County, said Larry Hugg, an information specialist for the U. S. Census Bureau in Van Nuys.