VANCOUVER — The star witness against accused Air India bomber Ajaib Singh Bagri admitted Tuesday he has lied in the past but insisted he is not lying in testimony against his former friend.

"I lied to get my papers, to save my life, not to harm anybody," said the man, whose identity is protected by a court order. "I was friends for (Bagri) at that time." The man said he lied to get into the United States and had lied to immigration authorities. He also confirmed he lied to Indian authorities to get a new passport while awaiting U.S. citizenship.

On Monday, the man told Justice Ian Bruce Josephson Bagri had confessed to involvement in two 1985 bombings which killed 331 people.

"'We did this,"' the man said Bagri told him during a meeting outside a New Jersey gas station a few weeks after the 1985 attack.

The man said reaching the decision to testify took several years.

"If I don't testify, it will be a very bad decision by myself and it will be also very bad for the world if they don't know. . . what Bagri has said to me."

Canadian police long tried to convince the witness to testify about Bagri's alleged involvement in the attacks, paying him more than $460,000 after he agreed to do so.

"That money was for my own and my family's, my relatives for protection of the life," the man said.

"I know difficulties are coming."

Under questioning from prosecutor Richard Cairns, the witness also confirmed he had asked the RCMP for an additional $200,000 in December.

In January, he said he went to India to deal with a family matter. On Feb 12, he sent a fax to RCMP Insp. Russ Nash again requesting the money.

"I sent that fax," he said, "but it was not my intention they would send me $200,000 in India and then I would come back (to testify).

"I have never said I am not coming back," he said.

He did not say what the money was for, but he told Cairns, he was not giving testimony in exchange for the money.

In 1989, the witness said he attended a meeting at a Montreal Sikh temple at the direction of the FBI.

He testified Bagri said Indo-Canadian Times publisher Tara Singh Hayer, gunned down outside his home in 1998, deserved what happened to him.

The wheelchair-bound Hayer had been paralyzed in a 1988 assassination attempt.

Bagri had been charged in connection with the assassination attempt but the charges have been dropped.

That same year, the man said he met Bagri at a New York temple after the arrest of Inderjit Singh Reyat who received a controversial five-year sentence for his role in the Air India bombing on top of the 10 years he served for the Narita explosion.

When the witness asked Bagri if he was worried, he testified Bagri said: "'Don't worry, he doesn't know nothing. Only two of us knows."'

Before the Air India attack, the man's apartment was raided by U.S. authorities. The court was told he swung a deal with one of the officers to act as an informant on Sikh militants.

He first met with an RCMP inspector in 1996, he testified.

Court heard Monday that Bagri and the witness immigrated to North America and were involved with groups accused of terrorism that were working to create a Sikh homeland.

The witness, who grew up with Bagri in a small Indian village, said he would not testify unless his name was protected. Josephson agreed that radical supporters of the Sikh separatist movement could target someone they perceive as a traitor.

Bagri and co-accused Ripudaman Singh Malik are charged with conspiracy and murder in two bombings on June 23, 1985.

The first blast ripped through Tokyo's Narita Airport and killed two baggage handlers. Less than an hour later, Air India Flight 182 exploded off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 aboard.

The Crown alleges the bombing was in retaliation for the Indian government's bloody crackdown on Sikh extremists, including an army raid on The Golden Temple in Amristsar, Sikhism's holiest shrine.