Tara Singh Hayer
| Tara Singh Hayer | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 15, 1936 Paddi Jagir, Punjab, India |
| Died | November 18, 1998 (aged 62) Surrey |
| Occupation | newspaper publisher |
Tara Singh Hayer, OBC (November 15, 1936 – November 18, 1998) was an Indo-Canadian newspaper publisher who was murdered after reporting about terrorism and is recognized with provincial and national awards.
Hayer was born in Paddi Jagir, a small village in Punjab, India. He emigrated to Canada in 1970, where he worked as a miner, teacher, truck-driver, manager of a trucking firm, and journalist before establishing a community newspaper, the Indo-Canadian Times, in 1978. He is the father of Surrey MLA Dave Hayer.
Hayer initially supported a theocratic sectarian-based Sikh homeland called Khalistan in the Punjab region in India but after the continuous terrorist acts by Khalistani extremists against Sikhs and non-Sikhs in Punjab and the later bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, Hayer began to speak out against violence in the Sikh separatist movement.
In August 1988, he survived an attempt on his life that left him in a wheelchair.
On October 15, 1995, Hayer gave an affidavit to the RCMP regarding a 1985 meeting in London, England in the offices of the Punjabi-language newspaper Des Pardes, where he overheard a conversation between Tarsem Singh Purewal, the editor of Des Pardes, and accused bomber Ajaib Singh Bagri. According to Hayer:
On January 24 of the following year, Purewal was killed near the offices of Des Pardes, leaving Hayer as the only other witness.
On November 18, 1998, Hayer was shot to death, execution-style, while getting out of his car in the garage of his home in Surrey. His statement is now inadmissible as evidence in court and was later cited as a reason why the suspects in the bombing were eventually acquitted in 2005.
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