Ripudaman Singh Malik, who was acquitted in the 1985 Air India bombing case in 2005, was shot dead in Canada's British Columbia on Thursday morning.
The 75-year-old was acquitted in the Air India mass murder for lack of evidence.
Several media reports on Thursday suggested that Malik was shot at by unknown gunmen near Vancouver. He died on the spot.
"This appears to be a targeted shooting," the police said, adding that a vehicle believed to have been driven by the shooters was located a few kilometers away, "fully engulfed in fire".
The Vancouver Sun, a Canadian newspaper, quoted Kash Heed, a retired British Columbia police officer and later Solicitor General of the province, saying, "[the murder] is related to [Singh's] political advocacy".
Malik, a multi-millionaire businessman, immigrated to Canada from India in 1972, and became an influential member of British Columbia's Sikh separatist movement.
He visited India in 2019 after the Indian government removed his name from the black list related to pro-Khalistan (a separate Sikh state) figures. During the visit, he praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi and wrote an open letter urging Sikhs to renounce the demand for Khalistan as a separate homeland.
The Khalistan movement started in the early Eighties, and seeks to establish an independent country for Sikhs carved out of the north Indian state of Punjab, located on the India-Pakistan border.
The secessionist movement witnessed a rise in violence in the Eighties, at the same time the Air India bombing attack occurred. The movement almost fizzled out in the Nineties after the Indian authorities took stringent action against it.
However, Malik's 2019 appeal of renouncing the Khalistani movement didn't go down well with a separatist group Sikhs for Justice (SFJ).
The Indian government banned SFJ in 2019 for secessionist activities.
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