Judgment due in 1985 Air India bombings

TWO men charged in the deadliest terrorist attack on a commercial airliner prior to September 11 will learn their fate in a Canadian courtroom today, as a judge delivers his verdict in the Air India bombings that killed 331 people off the coast of Cork.

On June 23, 1985, Air India Flight 182 from Montreal to London, carrying passengers from Vancouver, exploded and crashed into the Atlantic. 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 flight.

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. It can never leave us,” she said.

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 again.

The two pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy and putting a bomb on aircraft for the two explosions.

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.

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 labelled 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.

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