CANADA: No Joy After Suspect Finally Jailed for Air India Bombing

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Feb 12 2003 (IPS) - While some defied the decision and others were quietly accepting, it is likely that no one in Canada rejoiced at this week’s surprise guilty plea and five-year sentence of the main suspect in the 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329 passengers over the Atlantic Ocean.

Inderjit Singh Reyat surprised a Vancouver court Monday when he stood to deliver the plea, a move that came at the start of what was expected to be a two-three-year trial of three men charged with the crime after a lengthy, expensive and controversial investigation.

"A person kills 329 people and he gets five years? That’s disgusting," said Sushila Rauthan, 53, of Nepean in central Ontario province, whose husband Budhi, 40, and 17-year-old daughter Pooja perished.

"Suppose I kill somebody and I get five years? What do you think?" Rauthan told the Globe and Mail newspaper.

Biochemist Ramji Khandelwal lost two daughters in the bombing. "I have mixed feelings about that," he told the newspaper. "In one way there is relief that at least one of the persons has pleaded guilty. The sentence is really really disappointing."

Ujjal Dosangh, former premier and attorney general of the west coast province of British Columbia, defended the deal making by lawyers that led to the sentence in B.C. Supreme Court.

”The Crown has to decide whether it has the evidence to bulldoze its way through a long trial for a successful conclusion,” he said.

Others like Sudhir Anand, the publisher of the Weekly Voice, an Indo-Canadian newspaper in greater Toronto, reports some cynicism in the community and consternation that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) took so long to investigate and may have taken the probe ”lightly”.

After lengthy negotiations between prosecutors and defence lawyers, charges against Reyat, 51, of murder, conspiracy to commit murder and endangering an aircraft were stayed.

Instead, the man pleaded to the lesser charge of manslaughter. In a statement of fact issued by the prosecution and defence, Reyat, an electrician who supported violent resistance by Sikh separatists against the Indian government, admitted to purchasing bomb-making materials that were used to blow up the flight from Montreal bound for London.

Investigators in India also suggested ties between the bombing and the 1984 murder of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards months after Indian soldiers stormed the Golden Temple, the holiest site in the Sikh religion.

Crown prosecutor Robert Wright told the media Monday that Canadian police have ”no direct evidence whatsoever to suggest that Mr. Reyat intended to kill anyone”.

In the statement, Reyat says that the explosives were destined for India and designed to blow up property, such as a bridge or vehicle.

”However, unbeknownst to Mr. Reyat, the items that he acquired were used by another person or persons to help make an explosive device that, on and about Jun. 23, 1985, destroyed Air India Flight 182, killing all 329 people aboard.”

Wright defended Reyat’s five-year sentence pointing out that the man had already spent 10 years in jail after being convicted of manslaughter for another bombing at Tokyo’s Narita Airport 54 minutes before Flight 182 exploded over the coast of Ireland.

But Venkata Raman, a retired professor of international law at Queen’s University, is more blunt in his assessment of the five-year sentence.

”It is the most shameful example of the legal process in Canada,” Raman said.

A more diligent investigation of the bombing might have turned up stronger evidence to present in court, added Raman, suggesting that the Indian origin of most of the passengers on the flight contributed to the ”lax attitude” of Canadian police. ”If those people had happened to be Americans, they would have taken a different attitude.”

Initially, Canadian authorities assumed that those who had died were Indians, added Raman, pointing to the condolences that then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered to New Delhi ”rather than to the families in Toronto and Vancouver”.

In 1991, insurers and the federal government agreed to pay 18 million dollars to compensate the families of the victims.

Turf wars between the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) may have also weakened the investigation, says Andrew Mitrovica, author of ‘Covert Entry: Spies, Lies and Crimes Inside Canada’s Secret Service’.

Mitrovica and another reporter revealed in the Globe and Mail that one year after the bombing, a CSIS agent destroyed hours of taped audio interviews with two confidential sources during a probe of the incident rather than hand them over to the rival RCMP, apparently fearing that the identities of his sources would be disclosed in court. CSIS denied the incident.

”It is difficult to say if the bungling was a factor in the Air India decision. The information that he had was critical to the investigation,” said Mitrovica, who adds that plea bargaining in the Reyat case might have been necessary under the best of circumstances.

While destruction of the evidence ”set back the investigation for some years”, no one in the RCMP and CSIS was reprimanded, he told IPS.

Two other B.C. men are still on trial for first-degree murder in the bombing.