Dhian Thapar was gunned down outside his Whitby home after taking over a popular South Asian TV show whose host had been shot and killed.

Dhian Thapar was gunned down outside his Whitby home after taking over a popular South Asian TV show whose host had been shot and killed.

But like the murder nine months earlier of Prithyi Vij in Toronto, police have made no arrests in Thapar’s Feb. 22, 1992 killing.

Both murders were execution-style.

Durham Regional Police appealed for help again recently to solve the killing of the wealthy dentist and father-of-three who owned several Metro businesses, including the India Theatre on Gerrard St. E. Investigators continue to believe the killings are linked.

There were rumours Thapar, 49, was targeted by a black Muslim gang.

And four months after his slaying, Toronto Police charged a man with threatening to kill his son over a cancelled cultural show.

Investigators also suspected ties to the May 27, 1991 murder of Umesh Shantilan Raniga, 24, in his Gerrard St. jewelry store — one day before Vij’s shooting.

Interrupted while on his phone, Raniga’s cries for mercy — calling his killer “brother” while being repeatedly stabbed — were played to successive juries before the accused killer was acquitted for a second time.

No one else has ever been charged.

“These cases never close,” says Michael A. Davis, a former Toronto homicide detective who handled Vij’s case.

“There were so many different angles, but we didn’t have anything solid to point to a killer or killers,” he says. “Obviously we had an open mind ... we didn’t have tunnel vision.”

Vij “was assassinated, as far as I’m concerned. The killer was waiting for him,” he says.

“There were so many people we spoke to,” says Davis, who runs a private investigation business that bears his name. Investigators developed several theories and decided “it was close to home,” Davis says.

“I’m not pointing fingers,” he says. “Obviously his wife wasn’t the triggerman.”

Police probed reports of financial problems with Vij’s business, marriage issues related to frequent absences from home for work and community events, plus Thapar ousting Usha from the radio show.

It was also an era of social tensions linked to India’s politics, including the 1985 Air India bombing, plus the wounding three years later of an outspoken Punjabi newspaper editor in B.C. — fatally silenced in 1998.

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