On June 23 1985, Air India flight 182 was operating on the Toronto-Montreal-Delhi route. As the plane was in Irish aerospace, en route to Toronto at 31,000 feet, a bomb located in the cargo hold detonated (Remembering Air India 182), and resulted in the death of 329 souls, 268 of them being Canadian citizens. (The victims) Nobody survived the crash. Five minutes prior to the attack, another bomb went off while being checked in Narita International, Japan. The bomb killed 2 baggage handlers (Haberman) and was meant to detonate on Air India flight 301, which had 177 passengers and crew on board. After these explosions took place, Canadian Law Enforcement deemed it was Babbar Khalsa, founded by a radical immigrant sikh preacher, Singh Parmar,
…show more content…
The most surprising thing about this case, is that CSIS wiretapped phone calls of well known sikh extremists, 3 months before this even happened, yet the RCMP was unaware of this. (cbc) However, the strangest thing about this case is that CSIS intentionally erased hours of footage. CSIS said that its standard procedure is to erase tapes, as there was "nothing of value on them". But at the Air India trials in 2003, defence lawyers forced the government to concede that it was “inconceivable incompetence when it erased all of the wiretap tapes.” (brown) The crown in B.C requested the tapes, hoping to find any evidence to issue arrests, but because of CSIS and their move of destroying over 150 tapes, only one person, Inderjit Singh Reyat, a bomb maker in Vancouver, pleaded guilty to one charge of possessing explosives, and was promptly released. Only when he was tied to the Narita bombing did he go back on trial, after a long case of him lying, creating diversions by claiming the jury was biased and demanding a new one. In 2011 he was sentenced to 9 years in prison (Nair). Because of the insufficient evidence, Reyat was the only person that was charged in relation to the Air India bombings. If it wasn’t for CSIS erasing the tapes, they could have used the phone calls as evidence that something suspicious was going on and a sikh extremist ring did infact exist in Vancouver, and they then could have prevented the attacks from taking
The most surprising thing about this case, is that CSIS wiretapped phone calls of well known sikh extremists, 3 months before this even happened, yet the RCMP was unaware of this. (cbc) However, the strangest thing about this case is that CSIS intentionally erased hours of footage. CSIS said that its standard procedure is to erase tapes, as there was "nothing of value on them". But at the Air India trials in 2003, defence lawyers forced the government to concede that it was “inconceivable incompetence when it erased all of the wiretap tapes.” (brown) The crown in B.C requested the tapes, hoping to find any evidence to issue arrests, but because of CSIS and their move of destroying over 150 tapes, only one person, Inderjit Singh Reyat, a bomb maker in Vancouver, pleaded guilty to one charge of possessing explosives, and was promptly released. Only when he was tied to the Narita bombing did he go back on trial, after a long case of him lying, creating diversions by claiming the jury was biased and demanding a new one. In 2011 he was sentenced to 9 years in prison (Nair). Because of the insufficient evidence, Reyat was the only person that was charged in relation to the Air India bombings. If it wasn’t for CSIS erasing the tapes, they could have used the phone calls as evidence that something suspicious was going on and a sikh extremist ring did infact exist in Vancouver, and they then could have prevented the attacks from taking