Retro Raunch Revisit

JUN 23, 1985: Canada's worst ever terrorist attack and incident of mass murder occurs when a planted bomb (out of Vancouver International Airport) on Air India Flight 182 explodes over the Atlantic Ocean and crashes off the Irish coast killing all 329 people on board. Most of the dead were Canadian citizens of Indian descent from Southern Ontario. The flight had originated from Toronto to India via Montreal onto London and was the deadliest single incident of aviation terrorism in history until 9/11. The masterminds are believed to be Inderjit Singh Reyat and Talwinder Singh Parmar, Sikh militants belonging to the Babbar Khalsa extremist group formed in Apr 1978 to advocate for an independent Khalistan in the Punjab by using terrorism, assassinations & bombings. Only 1hr before AIF182, a bomb had exploded at Narita International Airport near Tokyo killing 2 baggage handlers & injuring 4. The bomb was in luggage being transferred to AIF301 that was also out of Vancouver flying to Thailand and would have killed another 177 people. Only a handful of suspects were ever arrested (no less than 8) for AIF182 -- some more than 15yrs later -- and only Reyat (the bombmaker who was extradited from Britain in Dec 1989) was convicted after pleading guilty to mansluaghter in May 1991 and again in Feb 2003 while already serving 10yrs imprisonment. He was released in Feb 2009 but in Sept 2010, he is convicted of perjury for lying on the stand 19 times and was sentenced to 9yrs behind bars. After Reyat is twice rejected on appeal, he is released from a halfway house in Jan 2016. Parmar was initially arrested after the attack in Nov 1985 but released on insufficeint evidence. He slipped back to India and in Oct 1992 was killed in an alleged gun battle while in police custody that some have called a staged encounter to cover-up his having been tortured after supposedly saying he was framed. In Oct 2000, the RCMP arrested 2 more accused in Vancouver (Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri) but both were found not guilty in May 2005 on the grounds of witnesses deemed not credible. The complex AIF182 criminal trial ended in Apr 2005 and at 19 months was the longest & most expensive in Canadian history costing $130 million. On the 20th Anniversary of AIF182 in 2005, Prime Minster Paul Martin attended a memorial service in Ireland with the unveiling of a monument and declaring a national day of mourning. On the 25th Anniversary in 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered an official apology to the families of the victims. In May 2006, Canada's Supreme Court ordered a Commission of Inquiry into the bombings which was completed & released in Jun 2010. The 4000 page-long published report found that Parmar was the leader of the conspiracy and damningly found that the government had made a "cascading series of errors" by ignoring Indian intelligence warning of the possibility of bombs on Air India flights in Canada just 2 weeks before the crash, not taking action on an Air India telex and security intercepts about time delay devices & threats, overseeing weak airport security, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's (CSIS) negligence in destroying 156 of 210 wiretaps from informants about the suspects, and the RCMP's failed protection of Indo-Canadian newspaper publisher Tara Singh Hayer who was murdered in Nov 1998 after providing an affidavit in Oct 1995 claimimg Bagri had admitted involvement. CSIS was cleared of any wrongdoing but its new director stated that his Agency had "dropped the ball" during their investigation which was badly bungled. In Jun 2023, a Canadian study found that 9 out of 10 of the population's citizens had little to no knowledge of the attack with only 1 in 5 being able to correctly identify the tragedy as terrorism. The findings also found that 58% of those aged 35 and younger had never even heard of AIF182 meaning only 1 in 10 understand the events of what happened and its aftermath.