NEW DELHI, May 5: India will wait for Canadian police to share information on the three Indian men it has arrested and charged with the murder of a Khalistani terrorist last year, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar said.
The Canadian police charged the three on Friday over the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar and said they were probing whether the suspects had links to the Indian government.
Mr Jaishankar said he had seen news of the arrests and said the suspects “apparently are Indians of some kind of gang background… we’ll have to wait for the police to tell us.” “But, as I said, one of our concerns which we have been telling them is that, you know, they have allowed organized crime from India, specifically from Punjab, to operate in Canada,” said Mr Jaishankar.
Sanjay Verma, India’s high commissioner to Canada, said it hopes to get regular updates from Canadian authorities regarding the three arrested Indians. “I understand that the arrests have been made as a result of investigations conducted by the relevant Canadian law enforcement agencies. This issue is internal to Canada and therefore we have no comments to offer in this regard,” Mr Verma added.
The trio, all Indian nationals, were arrested in the city of Edmonton in Alberta on Friday, police said. Nijjar, 45, was shot dead in June outside a gurdwara in Surrey, a Vancouver suburb with a large Sikh population. A few months later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged Indian government involvement, prompting a diplomatic crisis with New Delhi.
(Manas Dasgupta)
