India’s terror network has gone global: Pakistan’s FO

Islamabad, The Gulf Observer: Pakistan’s Foreign Office on Wednesday said the news of India’s involvement in an extrajudicial killing in Canada had shown that the country’s “network of extra-territorial killings had now gone global”.

“India’s assassination of a Canadian national on the Canadian soil is a clear violation of international law and the UN principle of state sovereignty,” spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said at her weekly news briefing.

The spokesperson was responding to a question on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s statement that he had “credible evidence” linking the Indian state to Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s murder must be based on “some facts.”

Nijjar, 45, was shot dead in his vehicle by two masked gunmen in the busy car park of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in British Columbia, a Canadian province.

The spokesperson said the incident was a “reckless and irresponsible act” that called into question India’s reliability as a credible international partner and its claims for enhanced global responsibilities. About India’s previous record, she said for decades, the Indian intelligence agency RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) had been actively involved in abductions and assassinations in South Asia.

Pakistan, she said, remained a target of a series of targeted killings and espionage by RAW. She recalled that in December 2022, Pakistan released a comprehensive dossier providing concrete and irrefutable evidence of India’s involvement in the Lahore attack of June 2021. The attack was planned and executed by Indian intelligence.