New Delhi: The Canadian prime minister and foreign minister have responded to the US federal prosecutors’ charges that an “identified Indian government employee” ordered the murder of a US citizen and may have overseen the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.Foreign minister Mélanie Joly said she would not comment on the US criminal case, but said India must help Canada track down Nijjar’s killers. “We stand by our own credible allegations that there was a killing of a Canadian on Canadian soil, linking to Indian agents,” she said at a press conference in Brussels, according to The Globe and Mail. “We call on India to engage in our own investigation.”Joly also said that she had spoken to both US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar multiple times on Nijjar’s killing. Canadian media had reported that Joly and Jaishankar had an unannounced meeting in Washington on this matter. “We call on their co-operation to make sure this investigation is able to proceed,” she said.The foreign minister also expressed displeasure at India’s decision to expel 41 Canadian diplomats from India. “It is my hope that the 41 diplomats, who should be working right now in India, are allowed back,” she said.Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has echoed the sentiments expressed by Joly. “The news coming out of the United States further underscores what we’ve been talking about from the very beginning: which is India needs to take this seriously,” Trudeau said, according to CBC. “The Indian government needs to work with us to ensure that we’re getting to the bottom of this. This is not something that anyone can take lightly.”Also read: From Nijjar to Pannun, Modi Government’s Recklessness is Undermining National InterestOn Wednesday, November 29, federal prosecutors in the US filed explosive charges in a New York court which detailed how a plot to kill a US citizen who runs a pro-Khalistan organisation, ordered by an “identified Indian government employee”, was thwarted by US law enforcement agencies.The target, identified in the indictment only as ‘the Victim’, is apparently Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the general counsel for Sikhs for Justice, a group that is banned in India. The plotters identified by the US prosecutors are Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, and ‘CC-1’, an Indian government employee. Both were based in India and directed the operation from here.The indictment also contains damaging information about the Indian official’s involvement in the June 18, 2023 assassination of Khalistani activist Hardeep Nijjar in Canada and is likely to add weight to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s charge that there were ‘credible allegations’ linking the Indian government to the killing.