Not Guilty: A judge ends the Air India trial. But conflicts over nationalism linger in the Canadian-Sikh community.
Published: Time magazine, Canada March 28, 2005
Byline: Deborah Jones/Vancouver
The ruling by Judge Ian Bruce Josephson absolving two Sikh nationalists in the bombing of Air India Flight 182 divided the packed room in the Vancouver Law Courts last week: supporters of the accused gasped with relief while relatives of the 329 victims cried in disbelief that their 20-year quest to bring the killers to justice would be unfulfilled.
Josephson's ruling, that the chief witnesses against Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri were not remotely credible, still leaves intact a whodunit of global proportions, among other issues. Who conspired to plant bombs on flights leaving Vancouver and connecting with two Air India planes? Will the acquittals fan once ardent passions among extremist Sikh separatists, who two decades ago waged a ferocious fight with India for an independent Sikh state called Khalistan? The massive investigation and trial did not even touch the hardest question for all Canadians: Is the country prepared to stop an attack by the next group of extremists?
The established facts in the Air India case shed some light. The leader of the conspiracy was Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Canadian immigrant killed by police in India in 1991. He was a co-founder of the separatist group Babbar Khalsa. Bagri was part of the group, whose members had called on Sikhs to punish India for crushing a 1984 separatist uprising at the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar. Yet India is now led by a Sikh Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and separatism has all but vanished there.
The dream of Khalistan has faded in Canada, home to 300,000 Sikhs, but separatist factions remain, says Rattan Mall, editor of the Indo-Canadian Voice in Surrey, B.C. When Mall was leaving India in 1990, friends there chided him about Canada by joking "Welcome to Khalistan." Experts say most extremists arrived here with a wave of conservative immigrants in the 1970s. Babbar Khalsa remains active in Europe and North America, say terrorism experts. "If there is a need and a leader, perhaps they will become active again," says Inderjit Singh Jagran, 41, a separatist who fled to Canada in 1991 and now works toward Khalistan with Akali Dal International, a political party that espouses peaceful methods.
Canada banned three Indian separatist groups in 2003 as terrorist, but their posters have been reported in gurdwaras, or Sikh temples, in Ontario and only recently were removed in conservative British Columbia temples. "I won't say they are a spent force yet," says John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based security think tank.
Among Sikhs in Canada, reaction to the Air India trial is as deeply split as the bitter, longstanding rift between moderates, who have accepted modern customs, and conservatives, who want Sikhs to adhere to traditional ways. That split does not bode well for solving the actual crime anytime soon. While moderates have controlled the majority of British Columbia's Sikh temples since 1998, some Sikhs still won't help authorities. "In our communities, nobody will come forward, even though they know who did it, due to fear," says Sadhu Singh Samra, vice president of North America's largest Sikh temple, the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C.
That fear is well founded. The identities of many witnesses in the Air India trial are shielded, some are in witness-protection programs, and two potential witnesses were assassinated in the 1990s. The C$100 million trial itself was conducted in a specially built, C$7.5 million bombproof courtroom. Only one person has been convicted in the case: Inderjit Singh Reyat, who was charged with Bagri and Malik. Before the trial, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for supplying materials used in the Flight 182 bomb, and was sentenced to five years. Reyat had also been convicted earlier in the explosion of another suitcase bomb--destined for another Air India flight--at Tokyo's Narita airport, which killed two baggage handlers. That leaves no other suspects despite a 20-year police investigation costing some C$140 million.
Ottawa prosecutor Susheel Gupta, spokesman for the victims' families, discounts statements by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that 15 investigators are still working on Air India. "I don't really believe that at all ... as they've tried to do in the last 20 years, they've put it under a rock." The victims' families have called for a federal public inquiry into the failed investigation. Some are calling for renewed effort in finding the killers of Tara Singh Hayer, slain before he could testify. Malik, in an interview with the Globe and Mail, suggested that he was more interested in Sikh education than in Khalistan. But someone else was more interested in revenge: one of Malik's businesses was vandalized last Thursday. The Air India trial may have concluded, but after two decades there is still no resolution in sight. --With reporting by Arjuna Ranawana/Toronto
Copyright Deborah Jones 2005
Unanswered Questions
The Air India trial is over, but controversy still lingers over the 1985 bombings that killed 331.
Published: Time magazine, Canada, Dec 13, 2004
Byline: Deborah Jones/Vancouver
Susheel Gupta vividly remembers the Sunday-morning phone call that brought news his mother's plane had exploded. He was 12, and the downing of Air India Flight 182 off the Irish coast was, until 9/11, the world's worst act of airline terrorism. "I was supposed to be on the plane with her, but we could only get one ticket," he says. Nineteen years later, Gupta still wants answers, and is calling for a federal public inquiry into how and why his mother, along with 330 other victims, died on June 23, 1985.
A criminal trial in the case ended last week in Vancouver, but few expect it will resolve the controversy raging over the terrorist attack. As with 9/11, the bombing allegedly involved religious extremists targeting North Americans as part of a holy war over international issues. Gupta and other relatives of the victims, most of whom were Canadians, want to know more about Canadian authorities' bungling and efficiency-lowering turf wars, about how suitcase bombs slipped through security and what is being done to prevent another attack.
The next step will be the verdict in the just-completed murder and conspiracy trial of Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik, who were arrested and charged in 2000 after a 15-year investigation. For 19 months, armed guards ushered the two orthodox Sikhs into and out of a specially constructed C$7.5 million courtroom bunker in the basement of Vancouver's downtown law courts. Security was stringent as Justice Ian Bruce Josephson, presiding without a jury, heard evidence on the eight charges each man faced. Parking was banned on nearby streets to prevent car bombings, and proceedings took place behind bullet-resistant barricades shielding a 148-seat public gallery.
Prosectors contend that Bagri, 55, a Sikh preacher and rural wood-mill worker, and Malik, 57, a millionaire businessman, were crusaders in the struggle to create a Sikh homeland in India to be called Khalistan. The men, it is alleged, bombed the Air India planes to avenge India's 1984 attack on the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar, an act that also motivated Sikh bodyguards of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to assassinate her later that year.
The suitcase bombs, the prosecution alleged, were checked in at Vancouver airport and put on Canadian flights to Toronto and Tokyo, to connect with Air India flights. On June 23, 1985, one explosion killed two Japanese baggage handlers as they transferred a bag to an Air India jet at Tokyo's Narita airport. Within 54 minutes, a second explosion tore through Air India Flight 182 off the Irish coast. All 329 passengers and crew members were killed. Prosecutors argued that Malik had arranged and paid for airline tickets for two Sikhs, who checked in bags in Vancouver and then vanished, after Bagri delivered the bombs to the airport.
The trial was peppered with shocking revelations, including videotapes of speeches Bagri made in 1984 calling for the deaths of 50,000 Hindus and specifying Air India as a target. Before the trial began, two potential witnesses were assassinated, including Tara Singh Hayer, publisher of a Sikh newspaper in Surrey, B.C. Also killed, in a 1992 police shootout in India, was the plot's alleged mastermind, Talwinder Singh Parmar. Another immigrant to Canada, Inderjit Singh Reyat, pleaded guilty in 2003 to manslaughter for supplying materials used in the Flight 182 bomb and was sentenced to five years; he had earlier been convicted in the Narita explosion.
The verdict for Bagri and Malik is expected on March 16. Victims' relatives will be paying close attention, hoping at last for some sense of justice. "A failure to get convictions would really be a catastrophe from the government point of view and from the point of view of combatting terrorism," says Reg Whitaker, an expert on security at the University of Victoria. "It would leave this whole thing just festering." Regardless of the outcome, however, there are still many unanswered questions. Were others involved? Did authorities know of the plot in advance but still fail to stop it? Why was the investigation so troubled? The police inquiry, which through last year had cost C$42 million, is continuing, according to RCMP spokesman John Ward.
Dave Hayer, son of the assassinated publisher and a provincial legislator with the governing B.C. Liberals, suspects other perpetrators are still at large. "We have to learn from this," says Hayer. "If everybody brings their problems here and uses terrorist acts, it will turn this country from the best country in the world to the worst."
With reporting by Arjuna Ranawana/Toronto
Copyright Deborah Jones 2004
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