Killer of Kanishka blast accused gets life: Role of Ripudaman Singh Malik 1985 Air India attack, why he was acquitted

On the morning of July 14, 2022, Malik was shot several times in his car in Surrey, British Columbia. Two Canadian youth — Tanner Fox, 24, and Jose Lopez, 26 — pleaded guilty to the second degree murder of Malik. Fox was sentenced on Tuesday (January 28); Lopez is set to be sentenced on February 6. It is still unclear who hired the two.

Who was Ripudaman Singh Malik? And how was he linked to the 1985 Air India Kanishka bombing?

The Kanishka bombing

On June 23, 1985, Air India Flight 182 was on its way from Montreal to London when it disappeared from radar screens while flying over the Atlantic, near the Irish coast. The wreckage of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet christened ‘Emporer Kanishka’ was located within hours. All 329 people on board — 268 Canadian citizens, many of Indian origin, 27 British citizens, and 24 Indians — were declared dead, although only 132 bodies would eventually be recovered.

Investigations revealed that behind the deadly crash was the detonation of a bomb, likely placed inside a suitcase in the forward cargo hold of the aircraft. This made the Kanishka bombing the deadliest act of aviation terrorism at the time, and the deadliest act of terrorism in Canadian history.

Roughly an hour before the Kanishka went down, a suitcase bomb went off inside the terminal building at Tokyo’s Narita airport. The bomb was meant to explode aboard Air India Flight 301 from Tokyo to Bangkok, but detonated prematurely due to an error in how the timer was set. Investigations later found that the two bombings were related.

Role of Babbar Khalsa, Malik

Both Canadian and Indian investigations concluded that the bombings were orchestrated by Khalistani separatist outfit Babbar Khalsa as retribution for Operation Blue Star which saw the Indian Army enter the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 to flush out militants led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

Talwinder Singh Parmar, the founder of Babbar Khalsa, was the alleged mastermind of the bombings. He was killed in an encounter by Punjab Police in 1992. The trial in Canada revolved around three main accused: Ripudaman Singh Malik, Inderjit Singh Reyat, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, all Canadian citizens.

Reyat was the first to be arrested. An auto mechanic and electrician from British Columbia, he was picked up in 1988 from Coventry in the UK, and convicted on two counts of manslaughter in 1991 related to the deaths of the two Japanese baggage handlers in Tokyo, as well as four other charges relating to the Narita blast. He also got a five-year term on one count of manslaughter relating to the Kanishka bombing.

Malik and Bagri were arrested in Vancouver in 2000. Malik, said to be a close associate of Parmar, was the alleged financier of the plot, while Bagri allegedly carried the bomb-laden suitcases to Vancouver airport. Both had migrated to Canada in the 1970s, where they soon became community leaders in the Sikh diaspora. Both were associated with Babbar Khalsa.

A questionable acquittal

The trial for the Kanishka bombing began in 2003. Reyat was made a prosecution witness against Malik and Bagri after he pled guilty to “assembling parts for the bombs” that blew up Flight 182 in return for a seemingly modest five year sentence. Malik and Bagri were charged with 329 counts of first-degree murder.

But in the witness box, Reyat pretended to remember nothing. As Canadian journalist Terry Milewski wrote in Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project (2021): “Right to the end, Reyat protected his comrades and was loyal to the cause… having utterly trampled his pledge to tell the truth, Reyat put his hands together and bowed to Malik and Bagri as he stepped down from the witness box”.

The judge called Reyat “an unmitigated liar under oath” but could not do anything. Reyat would be convicted on perjury charges in 2010, and slapped with a nine-year sentence. But because of Reyat’s “unreliable” testimony, and a host of other procedural lapses on the part of the Canadian prosecutors, Malik and Bagri walked free.

Notably, prosecutors did present the judge with evidence that Malik paid at least $116,000 to support the Reyat’s family after his conviction for the Narita bomb. Malik’s lawyers, however, argued that helping people in need “was common in the Sikh community” though as Milwski points out, “there was no record of Malik showing similar generosity to any other family, deserving or not.”

Till date, Reyat remains the only person convicted in connection with the bombings.