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Police Say Sikh Editor Was Victim of Personal Revenge

Arthur J Pais in Vancouver

For more than seven months, the family of slain publisher-editor Tara Singh Hayer have been saying his death was the result of political vendetta by extremists who hated his campaign against the Khalistanis and Sikh religious fundamentalists.

His son Dave Hayer has repeatedly said the men who were responsible for his father's death were also involved in the unsolved 1985 bombing of Air-India's jumbo jet Kanishka over the Atlantic near Ireland, killing all 329 people on board in the deadliest attack on a civilian flight.

But yesterday, Canadian police downplayed political motives and said the suspect -- who has not been arrested or named by the police -- acted out of personal revenge.

Saying that "we know who he is and where he lives", the police said the arrest will follow only after all the evidence is in.

The suspect, identified by the Vancouver Sun, as Inderjit Singh, a 38-year-old truck driver, has denied his role in the murder. While Singh admitted he was a member of the International Sikh Youth Federation, which is called a terrorist organisation by the United States, and a firm believer in Khalistan, Singh also asserted that he does not believe in breaking the law.

He said he was in another city the night Hayer was killed, and more than 50 eyewitnesses will back his claim. He was working with a snow-moving unit at the time, he said.

The murder of 62-year-old Hayer, publisher of Indo-Canadian Times, North America's largest Punjabi-language newspaper, was the first killing of a journalist in Canada. It was widely viewed as part of a bitter battle between liberal and fundamentalist factions of the international Sikh religious community.

But even as the authorities say the suspect was apparently angered by an editorial Hayer wrote, moderate Sikh leaders refuse to accept their version.

"Was the killing political? One hundred per cent,'' said Balwant Singh Gill, a friend of the murder victim and president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple in Surrey, close to Vancouver. Gill has been wounded in a melee in the temple.

Leaders of various fundamentalist factions repeatedly denied any connection with Hayer's death, but they also said they were not saddened by it. Hayer, once a Khalistani, had turned against them many years ago. He was confined to a wheelchair because of an earlier attempt on his life. He was killed outside his suburban Vancouver home in November 1998.

The investigation into Hayer's murder led Canadian police and detectives to the United States, Pakistan and India, and across Canada.

Dave Hayer, who till recently insisted that his father was murdered at the behest of fundamentalists, did not oppose the police report.

He appeared with the police officers at a press conference at the announcement. Even then, neither Dave Hayer nor his sister Rupinder has completely backed down from their accusation that fundamentalists were responsible for Hayer's death.

"The motive has been funnelled down to cold-blooded personal revenge," said Corporal Grant Learned.

But Dave Hayer must have drawn some comfort from Learned's acknowledgement that the killer might have been helped in the shooting.

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