Tara Singh Hayer, a 62-year-old Indo-Canadian publisher and prominent Punjabi-language journalist, was assassinated at his Surrey, British Columbia, home on November 18, 1998. An assailant or assailants entered his garage as he was getting out of his vehicle, shooting and stabbing him. Surveillance equipment installed at his residence failed to capture usable images of the killer that night.

Hayer had long been an outspoken critic of extremist violence and had survived a 1988 assassination attempt that left him paraplegic. His reporting and a 1995 affidavit about a conversation implicating figures connected to the 1985 Air India bombing made him a significant potential witness. Investigations produced allegations naming possible participants and suggested Babbar Khalsa may have financed the killing, but none of those leads led to a prosecution in his murder.

The case remains unsolved. Was anyone in the community in Surrey or the wider Punjabi-Canadian press who knew Hayer aware of threats against him or seen suspicious activity around his home in November 1998?