Air India Flight 182

 

They have betrayed us, mother, they have betrayed us

Shipra Arora, flight attendant

 

One of the worst terror attacks in aviation history was the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which took place in 1985. It killed everyone on board: a total of 329 people, 82 of them children. Prior to the bombings of 9/11 in 2001, this was the biggest air attack ever to have taken place. Afterwards, two men were brought to trial, but they were both acquitted, after an extremely long and expensive court case. The Canadian authorities were severely criticized for the incompetent handling of the case, which took nearly 20 years to reach a conclusion, and which yielded little in the way of results. Eventually, one man, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was charged with manslaughter for his part in making the bomb used on the flight. He pleaded guilty and was convicted, but the judge went on to give him a sentence of only five years in prison. The difficulties in bringing the perpetrators of the attack to justice have led to accusations of government corruption and conspiracy; and the issue has continued, in the new millennium, to be a source of controversy in Canada.

 

Bomb Blast

 

On June 23, Air India Flight 182 had set off from Montréal-Mirabel Airport in Canada and was flying towards Heathrow Airport, London, when a bomb exploded on board. It was 7.15 a.m. and the aeroplane was nearing its destination, flying over Ireland. Air traffic controllers at Shannon airport later reported that a crackling sound had been heard on their radio at the time of the explosion.

The plane landed in deep water out at sea near County Cork, and everyone who was on it perished. As the emergency services began the dismal task of sifting through the wreckage, a picture of what had happened began to emerge. Piecing together the evidence, investigators found that a bomb had been placed in the cargo towards the front of the plane, which had caused rapid decompression, so that the plane broke up while it was flying along. Amazingly, some of the passengers had survived the break-up of the aircraft, only to drown once they fell into the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean, almost 325 km (200 miles) offshore.

This was a tragedy on a grand scale, and the Canadian government duly set about bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice. It was thought that the bombing was the work of a Sikh separatist group called the Babbar Khalsa, who wanted to create a state for Sikhs in the Punjab. They called this state ‘Khalistan’, meaning ‘Land of the Pure’. Most of the members of this organization lived outside India, in Canada and Britain, and were suspected of mounting numerous terror attacks during the 1970s and 80s. Indeed, shortly before the bombing of Air India Flight 182, a bomb had exploded in Narita Airport, Japan, killing two baggage handlers. The bomb was in a suitcase destined for Air India Flight 310 bound for Bangkok. Thankfully for the 177 crew members and passengers on board that flight, the bomb detonated before it reached the aeroplane.

 

Double Dealing

 

As the investigation ground on, it became clear that this was going to be a long-winded enquiry. This was partly because of the complex nature of the evidence and the extreme bureaucracy of the legal system; but there were also those who believed that some double dealing between the Canadian authorities and the terrorists was going on behind the scenes.

Initially, four men were suspected of involvement in the bombings: Talwinder Singh Parmar, Inderjit Singh Reyat, Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik. Parmar was the prime suspect, as Canadian leader of the Babbar Khalsa sect. He had grown up in Punjab, India and had emigrated to Canada in 1970, living in Burnaby, B.C., with his family. A devout Sikh, he joined the Babbar Khalsa sect and became committed to the establishment of a Sikh homeland in his native Punjab. Like others in the sect, he believed that Khalistan, as the homeland was to be called, must be established by violent overthrow of the status quo in India.

Two years before the Air India bombing, Parmar had been arrested in Germany, suspected of murdering two policemen while he was in India. He spent nearly a year in prison before being released and returning to Canada. The Indian authorities requested that he be extradited to face trial in India, but they were turned down – with tragic consequences, as it turned out.

Because of his terrorist links, Parmar was under constant surveillance from the Canadian police. Not long before the Air India bombing, they had followed Parmar and an associate, Inderjit Singh Reyat, on a trip into woods on Vancouver Island, where the pair were thought to be testing an explosive of some kind. Although a loud bang was heard, when the police later searched the area, they found nothing to incriminate the pair. They then raided Parmar and Reyat’s homes and arrested them, charging them with possession of weapons and explosives, and with conspiracy. However, the charges were later dropped due to lack of evidence.

 

The Bomb Maker

 

Next on the list of suspects was Inderjit Reyat, who had grown up in India and emigrated, this time to England. Interestingly, it was not until his move to England, aged 13, that he became a practising Sikh, joining Akhand Kirtani, a religious devotional group. He trained as a mechanic and married before moving to Canada, where he lived and worked in Duncan, B.C. On the face of it, he seemed a model citizen, working hard, attending the local Sikh temple regularly, and living quietly with his family.

However, the security services had their eye on him as an associate of Parmar and suspected him of harbouring weapons. In 1985, he was arrested and fined for his activities. Afterwards, he moved back to England with his family – out of harm’s way, as he hoped. But the British police were keeping a close watch on him too. In 1988, he was arrested by British police on charges of manufacturing the bomb that had exploded at Narita Airport in Japan. He was then extradited to Canada to face his trial. Two years later, after a trial lasting eight months, he was convicted of the crime and received a ten-year prison sentence.

Reyat was also suspected of involvement with the Air India Flight 182 bombing and was charged accordingly. At his trial, he pleaded guilty, and he was charged with manslaughter rather than murder. He was convicted but only received a five-year sentence. This caused a great deal of controversy in Canada at the time, and outraged the family and friends of the victims. Rumour had it that the murder charges were dropped because he had struck a deal with the prosecution whereby he had agreed to give evidence against two co-conspirators, Bagri and Malik. The press and public were further outraged when Reyat took the witness box and claimed that he could remember nothing about the two men charged with the attack.

 

The Preacher and the Millionaire

 

So far, the leader of a known terrorist group (Parmar) and a bomb maker (Reyat) had, quite literally, got away with murder. But there was worse to come. Two other suspects, Ajaib Singh Bagri, a militant Sikh who had publicly called for the death of 50,000 Hindus, and Ripudaman Singh Malik, who was thought to have bankrolled the operation, were both acquitted, after facing eight counts each of first-degree murder.

Like Parmar and Reyat, Bagri was an immigrant to Canada and was a devout Sikh, well-known as a speaker among the local religious community where he lived, in Kamloops, B.C. He worked as a forklift truck driver in a sawmill by day, but much of his spare time was devoted to his work as a Sikh preacher. At a packed political rally in Madison Square Garden, New York, he made a rabble-rousing speech in which he vowed to kill 50,000 Hindus. This was in response to the notorious attack on the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar by Indian troops in 1984. Because of his violent rhetoric, he was immediately suspected of being behind the bombing of Air India Flight 182, but he did not face trial until many years later.

The other suspect, Ripudaman Singh Malik, was also a Canadian immigrant, where he had forged a successful career as a businessman, importing Indian clothing. By the time of the bombing, he was a multi-millionaire, but he was also a devout Sikh and devoted much of his income to good works within the Sikh community, including setting up a bank, a school and various charities.

 

Continuing Scandal

 

Unbelievably, despite the fact that each of these men was charged with first-degree murder eight times over, the court did not manage to gain a single conviction for them, despite many years of costly court proceedings. Thus today, the perpetrators of one of the major terror attacks of our time have, for the most part, gone unpunished – a scandal that, to this day, continues to haunt Canada’s political leaders. In May 2006, a public enquiry was set up to find out how such a situation could have occurred; but the architects of the investigation have left an ‘open time frame’ for the questions to be answered.