Speaking to the parliament on monday, Canadian Prime minister Justin Trudeau has made it clear that Indian government agents are behind the death of a prominent Sikh-Canadian activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Speaking in Parliament on Monday afternoon, Justin Trudeau said he personally conveyed “deep concerns” to his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month.

“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” he said. Meanwhile,Ottawa expelled an Indian diplomat in an escalating rift over the killing of a Nijjar.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in the compound of the Guru Nanak Sikh temple on 18 June in British Columbia.He was shot dead in his vehicle by two masked gunmen on a mid-June evening in the busy car park of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, a city about 30km east of Vancouver.

45-year-old Mr Nijjar, a prominent Sikh leader in the western-most province of British Columbia publicly campaigned for Khalistan – the creation of an independent Sikh homeland in the Punjab region of India. His supporters have said that he was a target of threats in the past because of his activism.

India has previously described him as a terrorist who led a militant separatist group – accusations his supporters call “unfounded”.