Francis Chartrand for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles

Dave Hayer can still remember his mother's screams as he arrived at the family's house in Surrey after getting a panicked call from his sister about an emergency.

"They killed him, they killed him," his mom Baldev cried, as his three sisters tried to comfort her.

Tara Singh Hayer, already paralysed in a 1988 attempt on his life, had been gunned down in the garage of his Surrey home. It was just before dinner on Nov. 18, 1998. He was 62.

Now, 10 years after the assassination of the outspoken publisher of the Indo-Canadian Times, The Vancouver Sun has learned there were at least three simultaneous plots to kill Hayer, all linked to his vocal criticism of the tactics used by a handful of violent Sikh separatists in B.C.

Many who knew Hayer are frustrated that no one has been charged a decade after the unprecedented execution of a journalist in Canada. But police say the investigation remains intense and active.

"We still consider it one of our priority investigations. We still have significant resources committed to it," RCMP Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass told The Sun this week.

Bass confirmed that there was more than one plot to kill Hayer in the works before the killers were successful.

"I would say that obviously there was more than one plot to assassinate Hayer and we are still pursuing multiple plots," Bass said.

Hayer made enemies because of his commentary in the Times, the Surrey-based Punjabi language newspaper he had published for years. He regularly targeted militants in the International Sikh Youth Federation and the Babbar Khalsa, groups that were later banned as terrorist in Canada.

But Hayer had a secret he had shared with just a few before his murder -- he had agreed to be a witness in the Air India case, having told the RCMP that he once overheard Babbar Khalsa leader Ajaib Singh Bagri confess to the plot.

An assassination. A dead journalist. A witness in the Air India case. All make the Hayer murder different from a standard homicide. It is different because of "the type of crime that it is and the fact that it is linked totally to the Air India bombing," Bass said.

Insp. Kevin Hackett is the head of the RCMP's task force into the Hayer killing -- Project Expedio.

"We are still continuing to investigate a number of conspiracies targeting Hayer and one of those we believe was hatched in Montreal," Hackett said.

ANOTHER FATAL SHOOTING

The Hayer investigation has an obstacle in common with other probes linked to terrorism or organized crime -- the reluctance of witnesses to cooperate with police.

Dave Hayer appreciates it is hard to get people with inside knowledge to come forward. "People come to me and they tell me things and I say, 'If you really want to help you have to give information to the police,'" Hayer said. "They say, 'Look what happened to your dad. He was protected by the police, he was prominent, he knew all the politicians at all the levels of governments. So if they can get to him, what about me?'"

Tara Hayer was not the only potential witness killed. His old friend and colleague, British newspaper publisher Tarsem Singh Purewal, was shot to death outside his Southall newspaper office in 1995. Purewal was the man Hayer said had the conversation with Bagri about the bombing.

As well, a Surrey trucker was convicted earlier this year of attempting to arrange a hit on another witness who had provided information to the RCMP about the Hayer case.

A young gangster said to have been the hired gunman in the final Hayer plot, Daljit Singh (Umboo) Basran, disappeared in 2006 and is presumed dead.

Dave Hayer says he understands the hesitancy of people to come forward, but it is imperative if Canada is ever going to put this dark period of extremism behind it.

"You can't go around scaring people, using intimidation to get people to change their mind," he said. "If everybody brought their problems to Canada, it would be one of the worst countries.

Don't bring your problems here and start threatening people, killing people."

Surrey resident Paul Gill was a longtime friend of Tara Hayer. Other than the killers, he is probably the last person who saw Hayer alive.

Gill was working on the Ross Street temple election campaign, the Surrey headquarters of which was two doors down from the Indo-Canadian Times.

Wednesday was the Times' deadline day and Tara would often have his friends to the office for a drink after the work was done. But on Nov. 18, Hayer seemed in a hurry to head home. He had to meet someone.

"I had just parked my car and crossed over to go into the office and his car was coming and he honked at me, so I stopped," Gill recalled. "He said, 'I have to go and meet someone.' He repeated that two or three times. So maybe somebody had called him and he was going to meet him at home. In hindsight, it seemed like he was racing off to meet somebody."

Tara was blocking the driveway to the industrial complex as he talked to Gill.

"A car came from behind and it was parked behind like it wanted to pass and we were in the middle. So off he went."

Gill and the others gathered at the moderates' campaign office learned of the shooting when Dave Hayer and his brother-in-law Kulwinder Aujla came by about 90 minutes later.

They wanted to remake the front page of the Times so that readers would know what had happened.

"They were in shock, but it seemed like they wanted to do something, so they wanted to put it in the paper that Tara Hayer has been murdered."

Back at the Hayer home, Dave's wife Isabelle decided she had to clean the crime scene.

"I can remember that nobody wanted to go into the garage and so I went into the garage because somebody needed to deal with that. And there was a huge pool of blood on the floor and I had to clean it up. It was very difficult," she said. "I was thinking how much pain dad must have endured through this vengeance, through this very vicious attack. I kept thinking what this killer or killers must have been thinking as they did this just seeing the sheer amount of blood on the floor."

THREATS MADE REGULARLY

Tara Singh Hayer was colourful and outspoken. He wrote the way he saw things, often engaging in personal attacks as well as political ones in his newspaper.

In the early years of the separatist Khalistan movement in Canada, he was a supporter, upset at the way he felt Sikhs were persecuted in India.

After the Indian Army attacked the Golden Temple in June 1984, he condemned prime minister Indira Gandhi in his newspaper. But he also condemned the tactics of the Babbar Khalsa and the ISYF, groups in Canada that were gaining strength, collecting money from the community and advocating violent retribution for the attack.

A few months after the June 23, 1985 Air India bombing, Hayer was vacationing in England, where he stopped by to see Purewal, who maintained a close friendship with Hayer despite their differing relationship with the Babbar Khalsa.

Hayer later told police Bagri, the Kamloops millworker who was later charged and acquitted in the bombing, arrived to see Purewal.

Hayer's statement said Bagri elaborated on details of the Air India plot to Purewal, who was then a trusted ally. Hayer was behind a room divider and heard it all, he told police.

When Hayer returned to Canada, he continued his relentless attacks on the Babbar Khalsa, the ISYF and those behind the Air India bombing. He even suggested in one article, later entered as a court exhibit, that Bagri had confessed while in England.

Hayer was regularly threatened. He got letters, phone calls and denunciations in rival newspapers.

On Jan. 26, 1986 -- India's Republic Day -- a bomb was wrapped in pages from the Montreal Gazette and left outside Hayer's Surrey newspaper office in what police regard as the first attempt to kill him. No one was injured.

Less than three years later on August 26, 1988, the second attempt on his life did more damage. A 17-year-old youth named Harkirat Singh Bagga arrived at Hayer's office and said he wanted to talk to him. When Hayer came to the lobby, Bagga fired six times, critically wounding Hayer.

Bagga was nabbed by a Hayer employee who chased him down the street. The teen initially told police that he had been helped by both ISYF members and the Babbar Khalsa, though later claimed he was lying. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years.

Police would later learn that one of Bagga's guns -- a .357 Magnum -- had come from a man based in Yuba City, Calif., who was also the registered owner of a gun police found at the Duncan home of Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only man convicted in the Air India bombing.

Hayer's recovery from the 1988 shooting was long and painful. He was confined to a wheelchair and was in agony from one of the bullets doctors could not remove. But he returned to his newspaper with vigour, turning against the separatist movement completely and saying the dream had been destroyed by the tactics of the perpetrators of violence.

The months leading up to the Hayer assassination were volatile ones for the Sikh community. Temple congregations across Metro Vancouver were torn between the remnants of the Sikh separatist movement and a new moderate faction that decried Khalistanis and demanded charges in unsolved cases like the Air India bombing.

Threats from a small minority of extremists were levelled frequently against Hayer and other moderate leaders in the months before his slaying.

One of them arrived by letter at The Sun newsroom on Dec. 23, 1997, saying Hayer would be killed if he did not stop criticizing Ripudaman Singh Malik, the Khalsa School founder who went on to be charged and acquitted in the Air India case.

"You die Hayer man. You die like Gandhi woman," the letter said, referring to the Oct. 31, 1984 assassination of India's Indira Gandhi.

But Dave Hayer said his dad never wavered, despite the risk to his life. He had tried to convince him to give up the paper just a few days before the murder to give some peace to his wife, who was constantly worried.

"I said, 'Maybe it is time to move on and let someone else write about Air India and terrorism and maybe they will leave you alone,'" Dave Hayer recalled.

"He said, 'Do you think someone else's life is less important than mine?'

"After his assassination, I felt the same way, that we have to continue."

And his mother, Baldev, urged her children to keep the paper going in their dad's memory, which they have done for the last decade. "She said, 'We are not going to stop the paper. They killed him to stop the paper.'"

They still get threats. They get targeted by hateful propaganda, but they continue. "We can't allow terrorism to win. We can't allow these criminals and terrorists to come over here and control the life of the rest of Canadians," Dave Hayer said.

Testimony part of probe

In the 10 years since the murder, much has come out about those suspected in the slaying. Ajaib Bagri, the man Hayer implicated in his police statements, was charged in October 2000 with attempted murder in connection with the 1988 plot to kill the journalist. But the charge was later stayed when a key witness lied in an unrelated court case, destroying his credibility. And in December 2003, a witness in a gang case testified that one of his associates, a young gangster named Robbie Soomel, told him that Soomel and Basran had been hired by the Babbar Khalsa in Kamloops to shoot Hayer for $50,000.

Basran, the young man now presumed dead, was distraught after shooting Hayer, the trial heard.

"You should have seen Umboo," Soomel allegedly said. "He was almost crying. Umboo said it was like watching his grandfather get shot."

The testimony remains part of the continuing Hayer investigation. In fact, it was Soomel's brother Rajinder who pleaded guilty to attempted murder in Surrey Provincial Court last March for plotting to kill the witness who gave police the information about the Hayer case.

Police continue to probe links to another plot involving members of the ISYF, who met in Surrey within weeks of the Hayer slaying to discuss an attempt on his life. And investigators from Project Expedio continue to target leads in Montreal, where a former leader of the Babbar Khalsa there, Santokh Singh Khela, confirmed to The Sun earlier this year that police had interviewed him.

Khela said he was adamant he had nothing to do with the Hayer murder and had no idea why police had approached him.

There have been ups and downs in the probe over the years. The Hayers learned just last year at the Air India inquiry in Ottawa that the police cameras at the Hayer family home were not working the night of the murder. Apparently an antenna had fallen down, meaning the only image captured was television snow. But Dave Hayer remains convinced that someone will eventually be brought to justice for his father's assassination.

"Our whole family is still hopeful and I am very hopeful that at the end of the day all the people involved in this, those who paid the money for this, those who hired the people who did this, will pay the price." .

Labels: Canada, Marie-Êve Marineau, Religion and fanaticism, Sikh

# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 10:05 AM