Air India Flight 182 Bombing

On June 23, 1985, a bomb exploded in a cargo hold of Air India Flight 182, which was flying over the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland at the time of the explosion. A handful of the 329 passengers survived the explosion, only to drown in the ocean. Members of the Babbar Khalsa Society, or Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), a Sikh extremist group, were implicated in this attack.

Sikhs are a religious minority who have lived in northern India since the 1500s. The vast majority of Sikhs live in the Indian state of Punjab, but significant Sikh populations exist in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. In the mid-1970s, a radical Sikh movement emerged advocating the establishment of an independent Sikh nation. In 1984 the Indian government launched a military attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, which was then occupied by militant Sikhs. The attack was deeply offensive to Sikhs and led to further violence, with the Air India bombings believed to be carried out in retaliation for the attack on the Golden Temple.

The bombs most likely originated in Vancouver, British Columbia, where an unidentified man booked two different itineraries from Vancouver to New Delhi, India's capital. One travel itinerary went east, from Vancouver to Toronto to London to New Delhi; the second went west, from Vancouver to New Delhi via Tokyo. In both cases, bags were checked through to New Delhi, but whoever checked the bags never boarded the flights.

Early in the morning on June 23, 1985, a bag taken off the Vancouver-to-Tokyo flight exploded at Tokyo's Narita Airport. The explosion killed two baggage handlers and wounded four others. An hour later, Flight 182, traveling from Toronto to London at an altitude of 31,000 feet, disappeared from the radar of flight controllers. An examination of the wreckage revealed that a sudden explosion, most likely a bomb, destroyed the plane.

Talwinder Singh Paramar, a leader of Babbar Khalsa Society living in British Columbia, had been [Page 19]under surveillance for weeks before the bombings because he was thought to pose a security threat following the attack on the Golden Temple. Para-mar's behavior during the surveillance indicated that he might have been responsible, and he was arrested. Canadian police had mishandled his surveillance—no one was watching him on the day the bombs were delivered to the Vancouver airport, for example—and key evidence was lost. Charges against Paramar were dropped, and he eventually returned to India, where he was killed by Indian security forces in 1992. An accomplice of Paramar, Inderjet Singh Reyat, a mechanic who apparently built the bombs, was also arrested and released; he was re-arrested, convicted, and sentenced in 1991 to 10 years in prison on manslaughter charges connected to the Narita bombing.

In late 2000, the Canadian government charged two Sikh men from British Columbia in the Flight 182 bombing, the cleric Ajaib Singh Bagri and the businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik. In June 2001, Reyat was also charged in the Flight 182 bombing, mere days before completing his 10-year sentence for manslaughter. Reyat pled guilty to manslaughter and received a 5-year sentence. Bagri and Malik, however, went to trial in 2005 and were acquitted. Reyat—to this day, the only person ever convicted for the bombing—currently faces charges of perjury stemming from his testimony in Bagri and Malik's trial.

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