Man flees home after Indian media disclose that he met with RCMP

Punjab resident Naudh Singh Thind thought he was doing the right thing by agreeing to meet the RCMP last week about his knowledge of one of the suspects in the Air India bombing.
Now, after his name was disclosed in the Indian media, the 30-year-old has been forced to flee his family home, fearing for his safety.
He told The Vancouver Sun that talking to the police was a "big blunder" that has led to him being falsely labelled a terrorist, a suspect in the 1985 bombing and a member of the Babbar Khalsa linked to the assassins of the state's former chief minister.
"I was only seven when Air India happened," a distraught Thind said in a telephone interview from India. "This has disrupted my life completely."
In fact, he only came in contact with the Surrey bombing suspect when the man spent time at a school where Thind was teaching in his native village of Rachhin, Punjab -- years after the Air India bombing.
The school's headmaster had a close relationship with the suspect, who has not been charged in the 1985 bombing that killed 329.
Thind met with the RCMP's Air India Task Force on Wednesday and by Thursday, his identity was all over the media across the Indian subcontinent and abroad.
"The RCMP had promised me to keep the matter confidential," Thind said. "By disclosing this matter means a threat to my life. I may be made target by militants at any time. You know what happened with Tara Singh Hayer [the Indo-Canadian Times publisher slain in Surrey in 1998]. If he can be targeted in such tight security, then who am I to escape?"
He also wonders who is responsible for his security now that word has leaked out that he talked to Canadian investigators.
He said his family is terrified and worries that no one will agree to marry him now. Even his gear manufacturing business is affected because clients don't want to talk to him on the phone, fearing it is bugged, he said.
17/11/08 Kim Bolan/Vancouver Sun, Canada

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Categories: Air India - International Nov 2008, Foreign Nov 2008, NACIL Nov 2008, Safety Nov 2008