Canada Minister Admits Leaking Amit Shah’s Name In Alleged Plots Targeting Sikh Separatists

Ottawa: Canada’s Deputy Foreign minister David Morrison on Tuesday confirmed it before a parliamentary panel that he had told a US-based newspaper that India’s Union Home Minister Amit Shah was behind the plots of violence against Sikh separatists on Canadian soil, according to reports.

Earlier, a report in The Washington Post had claimed that Shah had allegedly authorised a wave of violence against Sikh separatists in Canada.

“The journalist called me and asked if it (Shah) was that person. I confirmed it was that person,” Morrison told the committee, without providing further details or evidence, as quoted by Reuters.

The High Commission of India in Ottawa and the Indian foreign ministry had not made any immediate comment in this regard. However, India has been denying such claims.

Canadian officials had told the Indian government that “conversations and texts among Indian diplomats”—who were expelled from the country— “include references” to Shah and a senior official in the Research and Analysis Wing in India “who have authorised… intelligence-gathering missions and attacks on Sikh separatists,” in Canada, the Washington Post had reported.

According to the report, this information was conveyed in an unpublicised meeting between top Canadian security and foreign ministry officials and Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval in Singapore on October 12.

An earlier version of the Washington Post story did not name the minister and spoke only of the involvement of a “senior official in India”. But in a subsequent update, the newspaper identified Shah as the official concerned based on more detailed inputs from its sources.