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Hype, little action, surrounds murder of three immigrants in Vancouver

Arthur J Pais

Their murders made front-page news for several days but months after the slayings, friends and families of the murdered people are complaining the police have been taking too long to nab the alleged killers.

But in at least one case, Dave Sukhdeep Hayer, son of a murdered editor, hopes that it is a few weeks before the murderers are being charged. And he is convinced it has everything to do with the Air-India explosion that killed 329 people on June 23, 1985.

"Everyone (in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) is focussing on bringing the Air-India explosion case to an end and charge a few people," he said in an interview on Thursday. "And we have had a feeling for long that some of those who will be arrested in that case will own up to their complicity in the murder of my father." The RCMP would not comment on Dave Hayer's statement.

Asserting that the all three cases are actively and vigorously followed, police officers in Vancouver say they too are at a loss as to why they have not been able to nab the suspects.

"In Johal's case, we are handicapped by the fact he was a very complex man, who was gunned down in the middle of 350 people in a night club," said police spokesperson Janise William. Johal was killed with a single gunshot behind his ears.

"He was, we believe, popular among some people," she said. The police has not offered any reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer, William said, because "they will do so only when they have reached an absolute dead end." In this case, she said, they clearly have not reached the point.

Randhawa was killed on January 26 during her lunch-break after she got into a car allegedly driven by 20-year-old Ninderjit Singh. Her friends say they believe that Randhawa got into the car to give a final warning to Singh to stay off her. He has been apparently stalking her for more than two years -- and she had changed the school to be away from him.

"She must have had a fatalistic feeling about the whole thing," said a classmate. "Why else would she have gone in the car with the man who had made her life so miserable for more than two years? She could have given him a stiff warning standing outside."

Ninderjit Singh, who uses the alias of Soos, and is known by the nicknames of Beera or Bira, reportedly fled Canada the evening of the murder and began hiding among his friends and relatives in southern California.

Police spokesperson William said Singh must have known that it would be a matter of a few hours before he was arrested.

"We have been in constant touch with the police in the Van Nuys and Los Angeles area," she said. "We have posted his picture on the web, and there could even be a reward leading to his arrest and conviction."

Dave Hayer, who continues to publish the Indo-Canadian Times, says he suspects the police found it hard to find witnesses in his father's murder because "the terrorists here are doing exactly what they are doing in Punjab and other parts of India.". "They are threatening to harm not only the potential witnesses but also their families, not only in Canada but also in India," Hayer, who recently returned from India after a week-long stay in Punjab, said.

The Hayer family have had a lot of complaints against the police, including one that they did not pursue suspicions that Sikh extremists conspired to attack Hayer many years ago.

Dave Hayer pointed out that a Vancouver Sun investigation that showed the man convicted in that attack, which left Hayer paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, had links to members of the militant International Sikh Youth Federation and Babbar Khalsa.

Had other people connected with that attack been put behind bars, his father might have been alive, he adds.

Even though police and Crown counsel believed Harkirat Singh Bagga was just the triggerman in the 1988 attack on Tara Singh Hayer, the RCMP admitted in an interview with the Sun a few months ago that the file was closed as soon as Bagga went to jail for the crime.

"It seems so obvious," Dave Hayer said. "We know who these people are. The community knows who some of the key players are. It is a shame the authorities can't also bring this to an end."

"We were under the impression they were still investigating," Hayer's daughter-in-law, Isabelle, said. "Why would they stop when everybody knew there were more people involved? They had all this information and nothing was acted on."

That is the feeling of Ajit Singh Khera, a British Sikh leader who knew Bagga in England in 1987. He spoke to the media a few months ago saying he has no doubt the young man plotted the attack on Hayer with people from organizations such as Babbar Khalsa.

"It is certainly not something he did on his own. There were forces working on his mind to carry out this assassination attempt," he said.

"I think the Canadian authorities are to be blamed to a very large extent. They have let matters go so far," Khera said. "Something has got to be done. The community is crying out for it."

Hayer, like Johal and Randhawa, had become fatalistic too. He had talked often about how he had been surprised that he had not been attacked again after the first assassination attempt had failed.

Meanwhile, Johal's family members say they want his killer nabbed for one particular reason: Bindy Johal was killed just as he was ready to give up his underground life and get married in India. "It was not right, it was not simply right. My brother was going to have a new life," said his sister Jundeep, also known as Gogo.

Some of his friends believe his murder was part of a well-planned campaign to kill him and his associates. Johal had gained notoriety six years ago in the murders of brothers Jimmy and Ron Dosanjh. Johal, along with several co-accused, was acquitted of murder in the Dosanjh deaths. At least three of Johal's top associates have been shot dead a few months before he was slain and someone tried to kill his former brother-in-law, Peter Gill.

Bindy Johal had admitted in an interview few weeks before his murder that he was a small-time drug seller but never a murderer.

"He knew it was coming; he was tired of it all," a friend had said after the funeral service. "That is why he let his guard down -- he was not protecting himself."

The funeral service was attended by over 2,000 people, many of them teenagers who looked up to him as an immigrant who did not take nonsense from the white establishment.

The friend, who did not want to be named, told reporters: "A half-hour before he was shot, while he was in the [Palladium] club, he said to his cousin, 'See all these people, they don't know me -- I've got a big heart, but none of these people know that.' He was resigned to the fact he wasn't going to be around much longer. Half an hour later he was dead."

That has led to a concern that other associates could also be targets. "No doubt it is orchestrated, no doubt there is someone out there to get everybody -- but we are not going to hide," said a top Johal associate, who too for security reasons, did not want to be named.

All three bereaved families believe that some good will come out of the tragedies.

"We have shown to these terrorists that we mean to stand up and fight," said Dave Hayer. "If we give in easily, what good then is democracy in Canada? When our forefathers came here, they were insulted and spat upon by the white people but what our own people are doing to each other is terrible."

Johal's parents and relatives believe that young people -- who used to look up to him as a hero -- will realise the so-called glamorous life he had led was very ephemeral. "This is a kind of business nobody should get in," said a family friend. "God did not create us to die this way."

And Randhawa's teachers and relations believe that Canadian Indian girls -- for that matter any girl -- who have faced sexual harassment or stalking would report it to the authorities, unlike Poonam.

"Many of them are afraid that they will get a bad name if they report that an uncle, a family member or a teacher was sexually abusing them," said Simran Kaur, a friend. "Perhaps she was afraid that a stigma would be attached to her name.

"We should all get rid of that fear."

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