15 yrs later, Canadian cops arrest two for Kanishka blast

Air-India Flight 182 left Toronto on June 23, 1985, stopped in Montreal and was en route to New Delhi and Bombay when it exploded. In the course of their $ 20-million investigation, Canadian police had determined that the Boeing 747 was brought down by a bomb that had been checked onto a Canadian Airline flight at the Vancouver airport by a Canadian of Indian origin.

The bag was transferred to the doomed Flight 182 in Toronto. Ripudaman Singh, the Vancouver businessmen, is linked to a fundamentalist group. Bagri was aide to Talwinder Singh Parmar, the founder of Babbar Khalsa who was killed in India on October 15, 1992.

The two suspects were also charged with the murder of two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita airport, killed the same day in 1985 when a suitcase due to be loaded on to another Air-India flight exploded prematurely.

In addition, the men are charged with the attempted murder of the passengers on that flight, Air-India’s Flight 301, which was headed from Tokyo to Bangkok.

Police had already established a link between the two attacks. “The RCMP allege that both bombs originated or were placed on respective flights originating from Vancouver, British Columbia, as a result of an alleged conspiracy taking place in part in the province of British Columbia,” according to RCMP spokeswoman, Beverly Busson.

Both the late Parmar, and another Indo-Canadian Inderjit Singh Reyat, are named as accomplices in the plot to blow up Flight 301. Reyat is currently serving a 10-year sentence, imposed in 1991, for manufacturing the bomb intended to blow up Air-India’s Tokyo-Bangkok flight.

Canadian newspaper National Post reported that the RCMP has charged Bagri with attempted murder in a 1988 attack on newspaper publisher Tara Singh Hayer, a critic of Sikh extremism. Hayer was paralysed in an initialattack, then shot dead in 1998.

The two accused, the newspaper says, are to appear in court on Monday, launching a legal process that so far has occupied 13 Crown attorneys who have been working since September, 1998, assessing the evidence.

As many as a thousand witnesses, including some from Ireland and India, are expected to testify at the trial, which could last several years.

Const. Galliford said the Air-India task force, consisting of 60 officers, isrelieved but apprehensive. “They feel very hopeful regarding these charges. However, this does not mark the full conclusion of the investigation,” she said. “They have a lot of work ahead of them.”

The police, said Post, have reached 123 family members to tell them about the long-awaited arrests. “They are showing mixed emotions,” she said. “A lot, in very many ways, have moved on with their lives. They are very relieved and, of course, us being in contact with them has opened up a lot of things they have tried to put behind them, so it’s a very difficult time for them.”

India today termed the arrest as a “positive” development. “Any person who is involved in terrorism of any kind has to bear the consequences of the law,” an External Affairs ministry spokesman said.

(AFP & AGENCIES)