Tara Singh Hayer

Tara Singh Hayer was a newspaper publisher in Surrey, British Columbia. The Major Commission's report on the Air India investigation says he was a "Sikh by religion", born and raised in Punjab, who emigrated to Canada in 1970 at the age of 34. In 1978, after working as a miner, teacher, truck driver and trucking manager, he founded the Indo-Canadian Times and built it into the leading Punjabi-language newspaper in North America. The report says he was described as a strong supporter of the Khalistan movement and a harsh critic of the Indian government, and that he rejected violence and criticised leaders of organisations such as the Babbar Khalsa who promoted Khalistan by violent means. The Major Commission, which reported in 2010, devoted a section of its report to his story.

Threats and the 1988 attack: A bomb was left at his newspaper's print shop in January 1986. On 26 August 1988 a young man, Harkirat Singh Bagga, came to the newspaper's office, asked who the editor was and shot Hayer three times. Hayer survived but was paralysed. Bagga pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to ten years. The Commission says no one else was ever convicted over the planning of the attack; Ajaib Singh Bagri was charged in 2000, and those charges never proceeded to trial.

Air India: After the bombing of Flight 182, Hayer became a community contact for CSIS and gave both CSIS and the RCMP information about an admission that Bagri was said to have made in England. The report says that after many years he agreed to become a witness in the Air India case but was murdered before the prosecution began. The Canadian Encyclopedia says he wrote against the Air India suspects in the Indo-Canadian Times and had published incriminating information against Bagri.

His killing: On 18 November 1998 Hayer was shot dead as he got out of his car in the garage of his home in Surrey. His son David printed a special edition of the Indo-Canadian Times that night, the Canadian Encyclopedia says. The RCMP had installed a video surveillance system at the house, but on the evening of the murder officers found the antenna in a horizontal position and only "snow" recorded. The Commission found that the RCMP installed a proper system only after the murder, and that Hayer's story shows serious deficiencies in the RCMP's ability to protect a person who held information vital to the investigation. The report says that neither this murder nor the 1995 murder in England of his friend Tarsem Singh Purewal, a British publisher believed to know of the same admission, has been solved.

Key moments

• 26 August 1988: shot and paralysed.
• 18 November 1998: shot dead at his home in Surrey.
• 15 November 2007: his son Dave Hayer, a member of the British Columbia legislature, testifies at the Major Commission's hearings.

Remembered for: A Punjabi editor who kept speaking against violence for Khalistan after being paralysed, and whose unsolved murder is one of the cases at the heart of the Air India inquiry.