New Delhi: Canada will reveal evidence regarding the murder of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in the same “fashion” the US did with regard to a foiled assassination plot against another separatist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday.
This comes a day after FBI Director Christopher Wray was in India amid a US federal investigation into whether an Indian government employee was involved in the alleged assassination attempt on Pannun.
In an interview to The Canadian Press, Trudeau said Canada intends to reveal evidence “very much in the fashion the US did when we reach those points in the investigation”.
“But he noted that US authorities started their investigation into attempted murder earlier,” stated a report of the interview by the Canadian news outlet.
In September, Trudeau, while speaking on the floor of the Canadian Parliament, said that there was “credible evidence” linking India’s government to the 18 June killing of Nijjar outside a gurdwara in Surrey, B.C.
Asked why he went public with the claims, the Canadian PM told the news outlet that it was due to the “safety concerns in the Sikh community”, and the need to “put a chill on India”.
He also, for the first time, admitted that he decided to make the announcement because “he expected the information would be eventually leaked through the media”.
Just minutes before Trudeau’s June speech in Parliament, Canadian news outlet The Globe and Mail broke the story.
India and Canada have been engaged in a diplomatic spat ever since, with Canada withdrawing a number of diplomats last month on a request from New Delhi seeking “mutual parity” in diplomatic presence.
Meanwhile, the US Justice Department unsealed an indictment earlier this month which slapped murder-for-hire charges on US-based Indian national Nikhil Gupta. Gupta is accused of entering into a “$100,000” deal with the “Indian government employee” to facilitate the murder of Pannun. The Indian government set up an enquiry committee into these claims and has vowed to take necessary follow-up action on its findings.
New Delhi has denied claims made by the Canadian side and has repeatedly maintained that it is yet to receive any evidence linking Indian agents to Nijjar’s killing. Meanwhile, India is cooperating with the US on the Pannun murder plot case.
Also read: ‘Contrary to govt policy’: MEA on US indictment implicating ‘Indian govt employee’ in Pannun ‘plot’
‘Weeks of quiet diplomacy’
In the interview, Trudeau said his public statement in the Canadian Parliament came after weeks of “quiet diplomacy” with the Indian side.
This, he said, included a 16-minute conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 Summit in New Delhi in September. He said, however, that those talks were not constructive.
“We felt that all the quiet diplomacy and all the measures that we put in — and ensured that our security services put in to keep people safe in the community — needed a further level of deterrence, perhaps of saying publicly and loudly that we know, or we have credible reasons to believe, that the Indian government was behind this,” he said.
“And therefore put a chill on them continuing or considering doing anything like this,” he added.
Trudeau also weighed in on the role of the Indian media amid this diplomatic spat and pressure from his own opposition, including Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, to reveal the evidence against India.
“They chose to attack us and undermine us with a scale of misinformation and disinformation in their media that was comical,” Trudeau said in the interview.
“(It) would have been more comical had it not had real implications for peoples’ lives and relations between our two countries that are so deep in terms of people to people ties, and people depending on the flow of connections between us,” he said, while commenting on New Delhi’s decision to suspend issuance of visas, which it later reversed.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
Also read: FBI director to visit India next week, says US envoy Garcetti. Trip comes amid ‘Pannun plot’ talks