CSIS chief says he learned new details of alleged plot to kill Sikh activist from U.S. indictment

The head of Canada’s spy service is addressing his agency’s handling of the shocking murder of a Sikh separatist activist on Canadian soil for the first time since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blamed India for Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s death earlier this year.

In an interview with CBC News, Canadian Service Intelligence Service (CSIS) Director David Vigneault said he learned some details of India’s alleged assassination plot when a U.S. indictment was unsealed recently.

But he cautioned against speculating about whether that information might have saved Nijjar’s life.

“Some information that is now public was maybe not available at the time of the murder of Mr. Nijjar,” he told CBC News on Monday.

Vigneault says he’s hoping the ongoing investigation will lead to charges, at which point more information could be made public.

“I think before we see all of that, we have to be careful to speculate about if a piece of information was not shared, [if it] could have prevented an action to taking place,” he said.

Nijjar’s death outside a Sikh temple in June has drawn international attention and raised questions about whether Canada’s security and intelligence agencies did enough to warn and protect him.

Those questions were amplified when U.S. court documents revealed that American authorities had thwarted an assassination plot linked to India in their own territory — one with ties to Nijjar and a scheme to kill Canadians.

While Vigneault said he couldn’t talk openly about many details of the case due to an ongoing criminal investigation, he said he learned more about the criminal aspects of the U.S. case when the documents were released.

“I learned things from the U.S. criminal investigation … Because we are an intelligence service, we’re looking at the issues from a different perspective,” he said.

“But again, we have to be careful to not speculate about what the RCMP, as the lead criminal investigative body here, would have been aware of.”

When asked what kind of warnings CSIS and the RCMP gave Nijjar, Vigneault said reports of CSIS involvement in the case haven’t always been accurate.

“[The] Sikh population, you know, of course, is rattled by this assassination. And so I just would want to be careful about speculating that something could have been done in this specific case before all of the information is…