Hayer, publisher of Indo-Canadian Times, Canada’s largest and oldest Punjabi weekly, was shot dead in the garage of his home in Vancouver, British Columbia. An outspoken critic of Sikh fundamentalist violence both in Canada and India, Hayer had been partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair after an assassination attempt in 1988. Police have linked the man convicted in that attack to the International Sikh Youth Federation and Babbar Khalsa, two militant international organizations working for an independent Sikh homeland in India. CPJ urged Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien to ensure that Hayer’s murder is aggressively investigated and wrote to Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee asking him to cooperate fully with the investigation.