Kanishka bombing verdict angers victims’ families

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Vancouver, British Columbia: Families of the victims of the 1985 Air India bombings angrily demanded a public inquiry on Wednesday after a judge acquitted two Sikh activists of the crime. But Canada’s chief justice official said that little would be gained from a probe of the investigation and prosecution of the case that has cost more than C$100 million ($83 million) and was one of the most complicated in Canadian history.

In an emotional news conference following the verdict in Vancouver, shocked members of several families of the 329 people killed on Air India Flight 182 decried what they said was Ottawa’s insensitivity to their plight. “They owe it to us. They owe it to the 329 victims of this crime,” said Eddie Madon, of North Vancouver, who lost his father on Flight 182.

The court ruled that key prosecution witnesses against the two accused, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, were not credible, but agreed with the prosecution claim that the bombing plot appeared to have been based in Vancouver.

The Air India investigation has been controversial from its early stages, starting with whether Ottawa took warnings of a potential bombing plot seriously enough after the Indian Army’s 1984 storming of the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine. Police allege that Sikh activists living in Western Canada sought revenge for the temple attack by destroying Flight 182 on June 23, 1985, and attempting to bomb a second Air India jet at the same time. That second bomb killed two workers at Tokyo’s Narita airport.

Ottawa also stumbled in the hours immediately after Flight 182 went down en route from Canada to India via London by issuing condolences to India, apparently unaware that a majority of the victims were in fact Canadian citizens of Indian decent. One relative said Ottawa might have taken the investigation more seriously had the victims been “mainstream Anglo-Saxon Canadians.”