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A mass murder made in Canada
By Mark Hume The aircraft came down into the cold ocean in a shower of burning debris, the wings and tail having broken off to fall separately from the main fuselage, itself containing 329 people, 60 of them children under the age of 9. No one survived the cataclysmic bomb blast that removed Air-India Flight 182 from the sky off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, in what the RCMP would later call ''the most serious act of terrorism perpetrated on Canadian soil in the history of the country.'' For 15 years, a special task force of police investigators, which at the start numbered 300, has doggedly pursued the case -- in the process delving into the internecine world of an Indian separatist movement that sought to avenge blood with blood. With the alleged attack on Flight 182, and a nearly simultaneous attempt to bomb Air-India Flight 301, Babbar Khalsa -- Tigers of the True Faith -- was accused of bringing to Canada its war to carve an independent state out of the Punjab. Douglas Ross, a professor of political science at Simon Fraser University, said it is not unusual for terrorist groups to use Canada for fundraising. Everyone from the Irish Republican Army to the Tamil Tigers have done that. But the Air-India attack stands out as a singular event because the terrorist act itself -- a mass murder -- was planned and launched on Canadian soil. Mr. Ross said the Air-India flights were selected as targets not because of who was on board, but for what the airline represented. Air-India has long been a symbol of pride for the national government of India, and by striking its aircraft from the sky, terrorists hoped to damage the government's image. "The trouble is, you can't avoid killing a lot of people when you go after an airline with a bomb," said Mr. Ross. He said the attack on Air-India was so horrendous, and the public reaction to it so visceral, that in the wake of the mass murder, terrorists rethought their goals. But by then it was too late to save any of the innocent people aboard Flight 182, which included 156 Canadians. Police believe the attack on Air-India was planned and executed in Vancouver, where there is a large Indo-Canadian community. But the roots of the attack can be traced to India, where thousands had died in clashes over a movement that sought to establish Punjab as a separate state, to be named Khalistan. The conflict had destabilized India, and things came to a head in June, 1984, when government troops stormed the Golden Temple, the Sikhs' holiest shrine, where armed extremists had taken refuge. In the ensuing battle, 1,200 were killed. Sikhs were outraged by the act, and in retaliation Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, was assassinated by two of her own body guards, who were Sikhs. The Hindu population lashed back, killing Sikhs in the streets of New Delhi. When Rajiv Gandhi, Mrs. Gandhi's successor, visited Washington several months later, the FBI foiled an assassination plot. Two suspects escaped arrest: Lal Singh and Ammand Singh. In June, one year after the raid on the Golden Temple, a man with a South East Asian Indian accent telephoned the Canadian Airlines reservations desk in Vancouver and booked two flights. "One flight was booked under the name of L. Singh who was to fly from Vancouver to Narita, Japan via Canadian Airlines Flight 003 and onto Bangkok and Delhi via Air-India on June 22," states the RCMP. "Another flight was booked in the name of M. Singh to fly from Vancouver to Toronto. M. Singh was then to transfer on to Air-India Flight 182 en route to Delhi on June 22 ... A bearded Indian male wearing a mustard-colored turban arrived at the ticket office and paid cash for the two flights. "Although luggage made it on board both the aircraft, in both cases, the travellers did not fly," states the RCMP. It has long been suspected that those suitcases, each of which began their journey in Vancouver, held powerful bombs and that the names L. and M. Singh were chosen as a signal to insiders that a Sikh terrorist group was involved. At 7:13 London time a suitcase being unloaded from Canadian Airlines Flight 003 blew up in the Narita baggage terminal, killing two workers and injuring others. The flight had been delayed, otherwise the explosion would have occurred on Air-India Flight 301, somewhere between Tokyo and Bangkok. (The Crown would later prove that bomb was built in Duncan, B.C., by Inderjit Singh Reyat, an automobile electrician. Reyat is currently serving a 10-year sentence.) One hour after the Narita blast, Hanse Singh Narenda, the pilot of Air-India Flight 182 and Satninder Singh Bhinder, his co-pilot, were nearing Cork, Ireland, preparing to cross the Bristol Channel at 31,000. The flight was routine, smooth. Many of the passengers were asleep after watching a Hindi film. Shannon Air Traffic Control Centre was monitoring the flight's progress when a simple clicking sound came over the headsets of controllers. And in that instant the unthinkable happened. Flight 182 simply blinked off the radar screen. Later, ships would find bodies and debris scattered on the surface of the ocean. And a deep diving robot submarine would recover the aircraft's black box, which recorded the last moments of Flight 182 as "a thud, muffled bang and a faint shriek." For some, the sound of that faint shriek has never faded away. Source: National Post October 28, 2000, Saturday,
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