Verdicts due in Air India bombing trial

The two men charged in the deadliest terrorist attack on a commercial airliner prior to September 11 will learn their fate in a Canadian courtroom tomorrow as a judge delivers his verdict in the 1985 Air India bombings that killed 331 people.

On June 23, 1985, Air India Flight 182 from Montreal to London, carrying luggage and passengers originating in Vancouver, exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland. All 329 people on board, mostly Canadians, were killed.

An hour earlier, a bomb in baggage intended for another Air India flight exploded at Tokyo airport, killing two baggage handlers.

Canadian prosecutors maintain the two explosions were the result of one conspiracy.

Ripudaman Singh Malik, 58, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, 55, both Indian-born Sikhs from British Columbia, will sit behind bullet-proof glass in a custom-built courtroom to hear Supreme Court Justice Ian Josephson deliver his decision.

And watching the two men will be dozens of relatives of people who perished on the doomed airliner, a Boeing 747 named The Emperor Kanishka.

Lata Pada of Mississauga, Ontario lost her husband and two daughters in the disaster. She called the bombing a “diabolical act”.

“The pain and the memories keep flooding back about what could have been and why so many lives could have been snuffed for such a futile ideological cause,” Pada said.

She said many of the victims’ families had bonded over the years to support each other in their grief.

“We’ve all learned to find our inner strength to cope with it and carry on,” she said. “It can never leave us.”

She will be in the courtroom to hear the verdict, but says she has “mixed emotions tinged with frustration” as she thinks of seeing Malik and Bagri once more.

“My goodness, they just look like ordinary human beings,” she said. “How could they have planned something like this?”

Security at the courtouse will be tight. Parking below the building has been restricted and has also been banned on the streets around it. The bunker-like courtroom seats 179 and tickets for the session are being issued early tomorrow morning. Throughout the case, the accused have followed the proceedings from the bullet-proof prisoners’ dock.

Prison sources said Malik and Bagri were upbeat and smiling as they went about their regular exercise routine yesterday.

Malik and Bagri pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy and putting a bomb on aircraft for the Air India bombing and the blast that killed baggage handlers Hideharu Koda and Hideo Asano in Tokyo an hour earlier.

Prosecutor Robert Wright has said the bombings were an act of revenge by Sikh separatists for the 1984 raid by Indian forces on the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the holiest site in their religion.

Bagri, a “militant Sikh terrorist,” gave a speech in New York that urged the killing of Hindus in the drive for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan, Wright said.

In a July 21, 1984, speech at Madison Square Gardens, Bagri said: “Until we kill 50,000 Hindus, we will not rest.”

The prosecution has alleged Malik and Bagri were members of the Babbar Khalsa Sikh militant group fighting for a Sikh homeland in India’s Punjab region.

Pada believes that cause has run its course.

“Hopefully, it has seen its end, it has played out its time,” she said.

Jarnail Singh Bhandal, past president of Vancouver’s Khalsa Diwan Society which operates the temple Malik once frequented, says there is little sympathy left in British Columbia for the Babbar Khalsa and its aims.

But, he said, Canada’s Sikh community, one of the largest outside India, is “waiting very eagerly” for the judge’s decision.

“We are waiting for justice,” he said. “It’s very clear there is a conspiracy to kill. I don’t know if the Crown has proven … there is enough evidence to prove this mass murder,” Bhandal said. “I don’t know what way it will go.”

He said relatives of several society board members perished on Flight 182.

Prosecutors had hoped a third man who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the case, Inderjit Singh Reyat, would provide a direct link between the suspects and the bombing.

But, when Reyat took the stand, his claims of memory loss led prosecutors to apply for him to be labeled a hostile witness.

With the exception of several confessions testified to by star witnesses, much of the case was circumstantial.

The star witness against Bagri, a former member of a New York Sikh militant group who was paid for his testimony, said Bagri confessed to him at a New Jersey petrol station.

Taking the witness stand on March 21, 2004, the man testified Bagri said “We did this” as they discussed the bombing.

Similarly, a woman who said she and Malik were in love testified the millionaire businessman confessed to her several times.

“We had Air India crash,” she said Malik told her. “Nobody, I mean nobody, can do anything.”

Both of the witnesses identities have been protected by the court.

Much of the case against Bagri could hinge on which bombing expert the judge chooses to believe.

Crown expert Christopher Peel said the blast came from baggage area 52 where a mysterious bag from Vancouver would have been stowed.

The day before the blast, Bagri had asked a friend to borrow a car to take something to the airport.

Bagri defence witness Edward Trimble, a retired British Air Accident Investigations Branch official, testified the explosion came from baggage area 51, two feet from where Peel believed it originated.

Baggage in that area was loaded in Toronto.

That two feet could be the difference between a finding of guilt or innocence for Bagri.

Trimble and Peel, both of whom investigated the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, that claimed 270 lives, agreed the explosion likely occurred in a left aft baggage area.

In their opening statements starting April 28, 2003, lawyers for Bagri and Malik said prosecutors had a weak case.

And Malik’s son, Jaspreet, has denied his father was part of the plot. He said his father was being scapegoated and that both defendants would be acquitted.

The trial followed an investigation in four countries. Canadian investigators believe both bombs came from British Columbia, home to about half of Canada’s 200,000 Sikhs.

Reyat, the third man accused in the attack, pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter and was sentenced to five years in jail. He previously served a 10-year sentence for his 1991 conviction in the Tokyo airport bombing.

After Reyat’s guilty plea, Malik and Bagri chose a trial by judge. If convicted, they face life sentences, as Canada prohibits the death penalty.

Bagri also was charged with the 1988 attempted murder of Tara Singh Hayer, publisher of the Indo-Canadian Times newspaper in Vancouver, who was shot after agreeing to be a witness in the Air India case. The charge was later dropped.

Ten years later, the wheelchair-bound Hayer was shot to death at his home. No one was charged in the killing.

Investigators believe the Air India bombing was masterminded by Talwinder Singh Parmar, leader of the extremist Babbar Khalsa group. Parmar was killed by Indian police in 1992.

Malik worked as a taxi driver after arriving in Canada from India in 1972 and eventually built up business holdings, becoming a driving force behind the Vancouver-area Khalsa Credit Union.

Bagri arrived in Canada in 1968, according to court documents, and was a mill worker in Kamloops, 200 miles north-east of Vancouver.

A fourth man, former Vancouver Sikh Temple president Hardial Singh Johal, was also arrested but not charged in the case. He has since died.