OTTAWA (Reuters) – U.S. allegations that an Indian government official directed an unsuccessful plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist on U.S. soil underscores the need for India to take similar allegations by Canada seriously, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday.
The U.S. Justice Department said earlier on Wednesday that a 52-year-old man worked with an Indian government employee, whose responsibilities included security and intelligence, on the plot to assassinate a New York City resident who advocated for a Sikh sovereign state in northern India.
“The news coming out of the United States further underscores what we’ve been talking about from the very beginning, which is that India needs to take this seriously,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa.
The U.S. charges come about two months after Canada said there were “credible” allegations linking Indian agents to the murder of a Sikh separatist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in a Vancouver suburb, in June. India has rejected that allegation.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Steve Scherer in Ottawa; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
