Reliving the nightmare
It was the morning of June 23, 1985, and a bomb planted in the luggage compartment of the plane had just exploded at 31,000ft, killing all 329 people on board.
The navy crew stumbled on a scene of hellish proportions, broken bodies floating amid the wreckage of the New Delhi-bound plane. Personnel from the ship spent the next 10 hours fishing bodies out of the sea some 100 miles west-southwest of the Kerry coast before ferrying them back to land in west Cork.
Fourteen times the inflatable dingy Gemini put to sea in search of bodies and returned to the LE Aisling. Medical orderly Jim Sperin was on deck as they arrived. “The first task was to disentangle the jumble of broken limbs. One man at the head, the other at the feet, a nod or glance between them and the covering sheet was lifted to see if head and feet were connected. Sometimes they were, increasingly they were not.”
On Monday, two men went on trial for those people’s murders. Eighteen years after the worst act of aviation terrorism before September 11, after nearly two decades of anguish for the relatives of the passengers and crew, including 125 children, and accusations of botched investigations, the trial began in the newly built secure Court 20 in Vancouver, west Canada.
Ajaib Singh Bagri, a 53-year-old sawmill worker and Ripudaman Singh Malik, a 56-year-old Vancouver millionaire, face multiple charges, including first-degree murder and conspiracy in the bombings.
They are also accused of murdering two baggage handlers at Narita airport in Japan, where a bomb meant for a second Air India flight exploded prematurely.
A third man, Inderjit Singh Reyat, pleaded guilty in February to manslaughter and was sentenced to five years in prison on top of the 15 years he had already spent in custody for his part in building the Narita bomb.
Most of those killed were Canadians of Indian descent, believed murdered by Sikh extremists in retaliation for the Indian army’s raid a year earlier on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest shrine.
For many of the relatives of those who died, a remote spot in west Cork has become their shrine. They have returned to Ireland on pilgrimage to visit a memorial sundial at Ahakista. It was here in the days after the downing of the craft, in those famously distressing scenes, that hundreds of relatives arrive to pay homage to their loved ones on a windswept headland.
They also came to identify the dead and bring their bodies home to be buried, leaving hundreds of medical staff, gardaí, navy personnel and lifeboat volunteers deeply affected for life.
Among the families of the deceased there are mixed feelings about the trial and whether to attend. Some say there is no point while others believe it will bring relief that justice may yet be done.
“What am I going to accomplish by coming to the trial?” asked Krishna Bhat, who lost his wife Muktha and son Deepak, 9.
“How do you take out your anger, just stare at them and keep quiet?” he told reporters in Canada at the weekend.
Mr Bhat said he still feels “total hopelessness” when he thinks of how the case was handled by Canada’s spy agency and is concerned that key evidence may have been lost when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service erased wiretap tapes after monitoring suspected Sikh militants before and after the Air India disaster.
Lata Pada, of Mississauga, Ontario, whose husband and two daughters died, said the trial brings both a sense of relief that justice may finally be done but anxiety about old wounds being opened up.
“And there will be a very real physical presence to these phantom figures,” she said of the two men standing trial in a one-judge court.
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