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Slain Sikh publisher's family in Canada blasts police

A Correspondent in Vancouver

The family of slain Indo-Canadian Times publisher Tara Singh Hayer has many questions for the police. The kin want to know -- among other things -- why the Royal Canadian Mounted Police did not pursue the leads and hints that Sikh extremists who had attacked Hayer in 1988 were regrouping to murder him.

The events of 10 years ago are all too close for Hayer's family. Not only do they suspect some of the same people were involved in last month's assassination of Hayer, they also see some of the same groups occupying key roles in the fundamentalist campaign to win last week's election at Vancouver's Ross Street temple. The fundamentalists, however, were defeated by a sound margin.

The Hayer family members say they are frustrated, angry and hurt beyond relief that the police didn't pursue investigations that could have put others behind bars and might have prevented the assassination of the outspoken publisher at his Surrey home on November 18. Hayer, who stood with the militants two decades ago, eventually turned a moderate and began questioning the extremists.

The family members quote a Vancouver Sun investigation shows the man convicted in that attack, which left Hayer paralysed, had widespread links to members of the militant International Sikh Youth Federation and Babbar Khalsa.

Even though the police and Crown counsel believed Harkirat Singh Bagga was just the triggerman in the 1988 attack, the RCMP admitted this week that the file was closed as soon as Bagga went to jail for the crime, the newspaper revealed.

"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."

RCMP Surrey's constable Grant Learned admitted after calling up the earlier file for The Sun that "it was concluded at the time of conviction".

He said he cannot comment on why the conspiracy angle was not further investigated, even after the Crown counsel in the 1988 case, Sean Madigan told the court: "There's no doubt whatsoever, despite the oration by the accused, that this young man in a conspiracy with others, decided to eliminate Tara Singh."

Asked by the newspaper if Bagga, who is said to be living in Punjab and was visited 18 months ago by the Air-India Task Force, was being questioned in connection with Hayer's murder, Learned said he could not get into anything specific regarding the current investigation.

According to an Indian government interrogation report of British Babbar Khalsa leader Gurdeep Singh Sivia, who turned himself in to the police in India in 1992, Bagga was sponsored as a refugee in England in 1987 by Sivia.

Bagga then provided Sivia with the contact in Bangkok that Sivia used to open a cell of the Babbar Khalsa in the Thai city.

Four months before Bagga came to Canada in March 1988, he was in Lahore, Pakistan, where he stayed at the Dera Sahib temple, then being run by Surrey's Satinderpal Singh Gill, and Balbir Singh, of Edmonton. The two Canadians were senior leaders of the ISYF and according to the Sivia report, were "maintaining constant contact with the Inter-Services Intelligence [Pakistani] officials and senior terrorist leaders in India from Pakistan".

"They used to organise infiltration of Sikh terrorists in India from Pakistan along with weapons supplied by the Pakistan government," says the report, which was obtained from a source connected to the Canadian Security Intelligence Services. "They also used to arrange guides and escorts for the terrorists and arms consignments [to] cross over to India from Lahore sector in Pakistan."

Bagga's father, Santokh Singh Bagga, a controversial Khalistani leader linked to both the Babbars and the ISYF, used to stay at Gill's Surrey home when he visited BC prior to the 1988 shooting, two former ISYF members confirmed this week.

The sources also confirmed that the 1988 plot to kill Hayer involved the Babbar Khalsa and the ISYF, with both contributing 50 per cent of the cost. Their information is identical to the first police statement Bagga gave after his arrest, when he said people from both groups had aided him. He later recanted in court, claiming he had a personal grudge against Hayer for stories he had published about his father.

But RCMP officer Robert Stubbings testified at Bagga's trial that Bagga was under surveillance when he visited Vancouver in April 1988, four months before he returned to the province to shoot Hayer, the newspaper reported. Stubbings said Bagga visited the offices of the ISYF newspaper, the Chardhi Kala, which was being edited at the time by Harjinderpal Singh Nagra, the ISYF founder who was granted refugee status in BC last October.

Stubbings also testified that Bagga stayed at the home of another ISYF member that April.

Ajit Singh Khera, a British Sikh leader who knew Bagga in England in 1987, said on Friday he has no doubt the young man plotted the 1988 attack on Hayer with people from the ISYF and Babbar Khalsa.

"It is certainly not something he did on his own. There were forces working on his mind to carry out this murder attempt," said Khera, who has condemned the violence of the two groups while still supporting the notion of an independent Sikh country called Khalistan.

"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."

Khera said Sivia, since his release from prison in 1995, has been living underground in England.

Sivia's statement to the police, which he has never publicly recanted, also condemned Babbar Khalsa founder Talwinder Singh Parmar, formerly of Burnaby. Parmar, a key suspect in the 1985 bombing of Air-India flight 182, which left 329 dead, was killed by the Indian police while in custody in 1992.

"Sivia was totally unhappy with the role played by Talwinder Singh Parmar and wondered as to why Parmar was accepted in the Babbar Khalsa fold and given a place of prominence when he had contributed nothing towards the Khalistan movement," the Sivia interrogation report states. "Sivia levelled serious allegations of misappropriation of funds against him and was not satisfied about the defence advanced in favour of Talwinder Singh Parmar."

After the 1988 shooting, which left Hayer in constant pain and in a wheelchair, Bagga's father made a speech at Surrey's Guru Nanak temple, then run by ISYF Canadian president Jagtar Singh Sandhu.

Bagga, The Sun continued, praised his son for shooting Hayer -- "he deserved to be shot because he wrote about my good bhai [brother] Talwinder Singh Parmar and my good bhai Ajai Singh Bagri and my good bhai Jagtar Singh Sandhu".

Bagri, who is a Babbar Khalsa leader living in Kamloops, is related to Parmar by marriage. In Bagga's first statement to the police, he said he stayed with Bagri in Kamloops.

Another source in the Sikh community confirmed this week, according to the newspaper, that during the summer of 1990, while Bagga was incarcerated in Mission, his mother Gurjinder stayed for several weeks at Parmar's Burnaby home and was helped by Parmar's family.

Even though Bagga was paroled and deported to India in 1994, his mother has continued to spend long stretches of time in Vancouver, staying at the Shaughnessy mansion of controversial Khalsa School president Ripudaman Singh Malik, sources said.

Malik's school is still under investigation by the RCMP's commercial crime unit. Through the school, Malik has supported other family members of Babbar Khalsa leaders -- several of Parmar's relatives have been employed there and the society that runs the school has also financially supported the family of convicted bomb-maker and Air-India suspect Inderjit Singh Reyat. The school has been used for international meetings of the Babbar Khalsa and of Malik's own group, the Akhand Kirtani Jatha, a fervently religious sect from which the Babbar Khalsa was founded in 1978.

Gurjinder, who split up with Santokh Singh Bagga several years ago, lives in Toronto and was unreachable this week. And a woman answering at the senior Bagga's Princeton home said he was away for a few days.

The existence of a 1988 conspiracy to assassinate Hayer seemed obvious to the newspaper publisher himself. Twice in the last three years, he was quoted in The Sun about what he believed was a much broader plot to gun him down.

"I believe the conspiracy to kill me was hatched in Pakistan," Hayer told The Sun in 1995. "Bagga was only the one to pull the trigger. I would have been much more happy if the real person behind this conspiracy could have been caught."

Gill is back living in Surrey, working at the ISYF's Chardhi Kala newspaper and is heavily involved in the fundamentalist Dasmesh Darbar temple, from where much of the fundamentalist campaign calls have been made to supporters in recent weeks.

Bagri has turned up to support fundamentalists at several Lower Mainland rallies in recent months.

Jagtar Singh Sandhu, the former Canadian president of the ISYF, is president of the Dasmesh temple and actively campaigning for his fundamentalist friends.

Hayer's son Dave, who saw the Sivia report for the first time this week, said he sometimes has a hard time wondering why no one has been brought to justice for a series of terrorist attacks on Canadian soil, including those he suspects were really behind the 1988 plot to kill his dad.

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