Radio host who survived shooting still doesn't know if she was the target

Ashiana Khan was driving home from a family dinner late one Saturday in June when she heard the first bang.

It sounded like a rock hitting her car, she said, and, nervously, she started speeding down a BC highway. When she heard another bang, she realized what was happening — bullets puncturing her vehicle, just 10 days after she had spoken out on the radio about the murder of two teenagers in her town of Surrey, British Columbia.

“I was scared to even look out the window,” said Khan, after pulling over onto the side of the road. She recalls touching her body, as you would if you thought you were still inside of a dream, to make sure she was really alive. Her car now bares the brunt of the attack: rear window shattered, a bullet hole on the passenger side. Somehow, she escaped unscathed.

Khan has no idea if the shooting is connected to her condemnation of a recent wave of violence in the Vancouver suburb.

It’s an issue she has repeatedly tackled on her Punjabi talk show over the last four years, and it’s what led her to help organize a rally drawing attention to the persistent gang violence in the area.

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Surrey RCMP confirmed that an investigation into the shots-fired incident is underway. The radio host, who broadcasts through Media Waves Communications, which bills itself as Canada’s largest 24-7 Indian internet radio station, says she’s not sure if the bullets were meant for her.

“Would somebody go to an extent if they don't like my vocabulary or language or my truth — would go that far to do this to me?” she asked in an interview with VICE News. She’s received threats on air before — callers intimating that “we’ll see you” — but nothing like what occurred to her over the weekend.

The incident comes amid a new wave of violence in Surrey, which lies southeast of Vancouver. So far, there have been 25 shootings this year in Surrey compared to 59 last year, 61 in 2016, and 88 in 2015.

Last Monday, neighbours called the police after hearing multiple gunshots. Inside a nearby home, RCMP officers found a woman who had been assaulted and a man suffering from a gunshot wound.

Earlier on Saturday, hours before Khan left the dinner table, Paul Bennett, a nurse and hockey coach, was shot eight times while seated in his truck that was parked in his driveway.

The targeted killings in early June of Jaskarn (Jason) Singh Jhutty, 16, and Jaskaran (Jesse) Singh Bhangal, 17, two high school students who had no contact with police prior to their death, have triggered widespread outrage, and forced political and policing leaders to explain what they are doing to address the problem. In January, the body of 18-year-old Sachdeep Singh Dhoot was found murdered in the trunk of an abandoned car — the last homicide involving a teen in Surrey.

In an open letter to the community released this week, Surrey’s police chief described these as “challenging times” for the city.

“This issue of gang and gun violence is playing out across the Lower Mainland however, as a city with a large youth population, Surrey is a target for those looking to lure young people into the drug trade,” RCMP Assistant Commissioner Dwayne McDonald wrote. “Combatting this issue is my top priority.” Police say these young people, some of whom are only 13, are drawn into gang activity by the promise of gaining what they didn’t have before: money, power, security.

In an interview with the host of CBC’s On The Coast, Surrey mayor Linda Hepner said the city spends half of its operating budget on public safety and that there have never been as many Mounties as there are currently in Surrey. But since the mayor is not running for office in the upcoming civic election, there are no plans to bring in additional RCMP officers until a new budget is approved. That, she said, she’ll “leave to a new mayor and a new council.”

Some community members and experts, including a Simon Fraser University criminology professor, Curt Taylor Griffiths, are calling for the city to get its own policing body independent of the RCMP, just like those established in neighbouring Delta and Vancouver, that would be better equipped to handle the rampant gang violence.

Today, after nine months of deliberations, the mayor’s task force on preventing gang violence released its final report. It made six recommendations, including providing support services to at-risk youth and to doubling the size of the city’s gang enforcement team.

“We have a system problem,” said Khan. “It’s not parenting, it’s not teachers, it’s not police. We don’t have enough funds here in Surrey.” The RCMP, she says, needs greater resources and more officers.

That was a point made vividly at the June 13 Wake Up Surrey rally she helped organize.

Towards the end of the nearly two-hour rally, one of the speakers and an organizer of the event, Gurpreet Singh Sahota, ripped up a letter signed by five Surrey MPs that condemned the violence plaguing the community. The letter pointed to a five-year, $328-million investment from the federal government towards preventing further gun violence in Canada, another $43 million put each year to the National Crime Prevention Strategy, and the launching of a Young Gang Prevention Fund. But critics don’t think that has gone far enough — voicing that view at a rally and on social media.

“We’re sick of these announcements and then there’s no follow-through, there’s no substance,” said Sukhi Sandhu, a Wake Up Surrey organizer, to CTV Vancouver. “We’ve had over 200 South Asian youth killed over 24 years. We’re asking for accountability for our political leaders.”

But Khan says ripping up the letter was not the right thing to do — and she says she got angry comments on social media after she aired her grievances on her radio show.

“Here you are dealing with gang violence — we are trying to get our youth, our kids to stop this violence — and on the stage we are reading a letter and saying, ‘Oh, politicians are not doing anything. They are not listening to us and it’s okay to rip the letter apart.’” she said. “I said, ‘That’s a message we’re giving to the kids: if somebody does not listen to you it’s okay to tear them apart.’”

If the police discover her attack was indeed targeted, Khan says she doesn’t know whether she’ll continue being forthright in her views. "I will probably stay at the station, but I might think twice about bringing the facts out to the community.”

The only journalist ever killed on Canadian soil was Tara Singh Hayer, an outspoken Punjabi newspaper publisher who was gunned down at his home in Surrey in 1998. His murder has never been solved.

"The murder of Hayer was the greatest test, and, indeed, the greatest failure of press freedom in Canada,” Canadian Journalists for Free Expression wrote on the 10th anniversary of his death.

Asked about Hayer’s death, Khan hesitated, her voice going to a whisper.

“I still have tears in my eyes when I think about Tara Singh Hayer,” Khan said, pausing. “He didn’t deserve that. We all have different opinions. I can talk about things; maybe it does not make sense. But that doesn’t mean that you or anybody can hurt me. And if what happened to me was targeted, that’s not right. That’s not the way it should be dealt with.”

Cover image: Jess Mackie for VICE News