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INVESTIGATION:
KANISHKA BOMBING
Grounded
At Last
Nemesis catches up with the conspirators behind the Air-India flight 182
bombing as three Canadian Sikhs are arrested-15years after the incident
By Ramesh
Vinayak
It
is the longest and among the most complex investigations that any agency
has ever conducted. Nearly 16 years and $30 million after the June 23,
1985 blast aboard Air-India's Boeing 747 "Kanishka" that killed
all 329 people on board, the Crown Counsel in Vancouver, Canada, finally
charged and arrested three of five suspects still alive — all of
them Canadian Sikhs of Indian origin — for the most diabolic act
of terrorism in the world's aviation history.
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| 1985:
Bodies being taken off a rescue ship |
Besides the
arrested troika of Ripudaman Singh Malik, Ajaib Singh Bagri and Hardial
Singh Johal, the other suspects are Talwinder Singh Parmar, the alleged
mastermind of the conspiracy, Surjan Singh Gill and Inderjit Singh Reyat.
All the suspects have long been associated with terrorist group Babbar
Khalsa International.
While Parmar,
the then chief of a Babbar Khalsa faction, was killed by the Punjab Police
in 1992, Gill reportedly fled Canada a few months ago and visited his
native village in Punjab. From there, he simply vanished. Reyat, an automobile
engineer, is currently in a Canadian jail serving a 10-year sentence after
he was convicted in 1991 for his involvement in a bomb explosion at Tokyo's
Narita Airport less than an hour before Kanishka fell out of the skies.
His conviction — a benchmark in the Kanishka case probe — stemmed
from the success of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in linking
the Narita bomb splinters with a radio tuner that was bought by Reyat
on a credit card and used to pack the explosive two weeks before the blast.
It was in
1995 that the jigsaw pieces of the Kanishka conspiracy began to fall into
place. That was the year the RCMP doubled the strength of investigators
in the Air-India Task Force pursuing the case to 60 and re-focused their
probe into the activities of the core group of Sikh extremists in Canada.
The RCMP also began using on a large scale its powers under the Privacy
Act to conduct wire trap investigations on a list of suspects.
By then
terrorism in Punjab had begun to decline, and the extremist lobby abroad
too had lost its grip — a development that helped the RCMP obtain
vital clues from expatriate Sikhs. One of the key witness enlisted by
RCMP was Tara Singh Hayer, the influential anti-Khalistan editor of Vancouver-based
weekly Indo-Canadian Times, who was killed in 1998 after he had allegedly
spilled the beans on the Kanishka blast. The arrests, however, were still
a long way off, as the hunt for evidence would lead investigators on a
chase across half a dozen countries.
The Genesis:
The Kanishka story had its origin far from British Columbia — where
the conspiracy was reportedly hatched — in Amritsar. The RCMP investigation
report says that by autumn of 1984, the Canadian Security and Intelligence
Service (CSIS) had begun gathering intelligence on the activities of certain
key Sikh figures in Canada which showed that the Babbar Khalsa was planning
some kind of retaliation to coincide with the first anniversary of the
army action at the Golden Temple during Operation Blue Star. "A number
of plans were discussed by Babbar Khalsa members throughout north America
including assassinations, bombing important places in India and bombing
Air-India planes," says the report.
An interrogation
report compiled by India's Central Bureau of Investigation of Lal Singh,
a top Khalistan Liberation Force militant who was arrested in Mumbai in
1992, gave RCMP a crucial piece of evidence and an insight into the Babbar
Khalsa plans. After a stormy meeting of the World Sikh Convention —
a pro-Khalistan body floated by the radical Sikhs of the US and Canada
in August 1984 — Lal Singh was asked by Ajaib Singh Bagri, a close
confidant of Parmar, to dissuade Sikhs from travelling by Air-India flights.
"Bagri had suggested placing bombs in Air-India offices and blowing
up Air-India planes," the report quotes Lal Singh as saying.
The plan
was implemented almost a year later. On Saturday, June 22, 1985, a suitcase
was checked in on board Canadian Pacific flight 060 and throughchecked
to Air-India Flight 182 in Toronto. A similar suitcase was checked in
on board Canadian Flight 003 and throughchecked to Air-India Flight 301
in Narita, Japan. The two suitcases were checked in at the Canadian Pacific
counter in Vancouver by men possessing proper tickets — but they
did not board the planes. The flights left Vancouver with the bomb-laden
suitcases on board. "Unfortunately the security procedures and devices
that were in place at the Canadian airport did not detect the bombs that
were concealed in the suitcases," concedes the RCMP.
On June
22, at 11.19 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) — around 7.19 a.m.
GMT — the suitcase bomb which had been loaded from Canadian Pacific
Air Flight 003 exploded in the baggage handling area at Narita Airport.
Fifty-four minutes later, at 12.13 a.m. PDT Air-India Flight 182 disappeared
from the radar screen of Air Traffic Control, Shannon, as it was flying
over Ireland for a scheduled landing at London's Heathrow airport.
The RCMP
investigations hinge on more than 1,000 witnesses including Air-India
staff and intelligence officials from India. While 150 witnesses are listed
to help re-prove the facts behind the Narita bombing, another 100 witnesses
would testify to trace the suspected ticket purchases and luggage flow
at the Vancouver airport and airline office in Canada. Supplementing the
evidence would be a plethora of physical and electronic surveillance,
especially wire trap investigations, compiled by the RCMP and CSIS.
Close on
the heels of the arrest of the suspects, the RCMP has put in a request
with the Indian Government for a mutual legal assistance agreement to
firm up its prosecution. A team of Air-India Task Force officials and
Crown Counsel representatives is expected to visit Delhi this month to
brief the Indian authorities on the prosecution preparations. Clearly,
the trial of the suspects is shaping up to be as long-winded and tortuous
as the investigation itself.
-with Eugene Correa in
Toronto
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