Vancouver (British Columbia), March 16
Two Sikh activists were cleared today of involvement in the 1985 bombing of Air-India Flight 182 that killed 329 persons.
A Canadian judge said Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri were not guilty of murder and conspiracy charges for their role in the plot that resulted in history’s deadliest bombing of a civilian
airliner.
Justice Ian Bruce Josephson listened to 115 witnesses in arguments and testimony that took 19 months to complete and is considered one of the most complicated and costly in Canadian legal history.
More than 70 relatives of the Air-India flight-182 victims had come to Vancouver from around the world to hear the verdict.
Prosecutors say the bombers wanted revenge for the Indian Army’s 1984 storming of Sikh’s holiest shrine, the Harmandar Sahib in Amritsar.
The conspirators, Indian-born Sikh separatists living in western Canada, planned to destroy two aircraft simultaneously with one going down over the Atlantic Ocean and the other over the Pacific, according to the police.
One bomb destroyed Flight 182 on its way from Canada to London and then India on June 23, 1985, killed everyone on board. The other bomb exploded 54 minutes earlier in luggage being transferred at Tokyo’s Narita airport to Air India Flight 301, killing two workers. Malik and Bagri were arrested in October 2000.
The defence acknowledged there may have been a conspiracy to destroy the aircraft, but denied Bagri and Malik were part of it. They said witnesses that linked them to the plot were motivated by personal revenge or financial greed.
Malik and Bagri were originally scheduled to be tried with Inderjit Singh Reyat, but he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge before the trial began.
— Reuters
