The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : A DESPAIRING VERDICT

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Saturday, Mar 19, 2005

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A DESPAIRING VERDICT

TWO HUNDRED AND eighty of the 329 dead were Canadian nationals and the incident occurred off the southwestern coast of Ireland. Yet the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which plunged into the Atlantic on June 23, 1985, left a deep scar on the consciousness of an India that felt extremely vulnerable in the face of a savage international terrorist strike that had no geographical locus and that was indiscriminate about its choice of victims. The massive and long-drawn out investigation into the Kanishka bombing case — spearheaded by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and carried out with the help of investigative agencies in India, the United States, and Europe — seemed to be going nowhere until a few years ago. The arrest of three Sikh fundamentalists in 2000 and 2001 seemed to have marked a turning point in the investigation, with the RCMP claiming that it had finally gathered the evidence required successfully to prosecute the accused in a court of law. When one of the three, Inderjit Singh Reyat, charged with fabricating the bomb that brought down the Kanishka, pleaded guilty to manslaughter last year, it led many to believe that the charges of criminal conspiracy and first-degree murder against the two main accused, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, would be sustained.

The sense of shock and disappointment in India and abroad over the verdict of the Vancouver court, which recently acquitted Malik and Bagri, stems from the harsh reality that a protracted, elaborate and expensive investigation failed to establish the guilt of the two accused to the law's satisfaction. The investigation took close to two decades, covered a large number of countries, and consumed a reported 30 million Canadian dollars. The RCMP has justified the inordinately long investigative process on the grounds that a large number of witnesses needed to be interrogated, that there were international ramifications to this case, and that cooperation on terrorism issues was much weaker when the probe was conducted than it is today. There is an element of truth in this explanation, but the lengthy 15-year hiatus between the Kanishka bombing and the first arrests in the case cannot be explained away by these factors alone. Crucial leads, which emerged within three months of the Kanishka tragedy, were apparently not followed up with the seriousness they deserved. For instance, the founder of the Babbar Khalsa, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was taken into custody in September 1985 in connection with the bomb blast at Narita airport. This terrorist outrage took place on the same day as the Kanishka bombing and the explosive was intended to blow up an Air India flight out of Tokyo. The two terrorist strikes were clearly related but Parmar was let off. Significantly, Justice Ian Bruce Josephson of the Vancouver court noted that Parmar, who fled some years later to India where he was shot dead in 1992 by the Punjab police, was the likely mastermind behind the Kanishka bombing.

The investigation was also marred by allegations of bungling, following revelations that intelligence officials had furnished misleading affidavits to conduct phone taps, and that taped interviews with Air India officials were destroyed because of a turf war within the investigative machinery. The prosecution was forced to rely heavily on the testimony of a string of witnesses, including that of a former lover of Malik. While it may have shown that the two had a clear motive to blow up the Kanishka, the prosecution evidently failed to unearth the evidence required to prove their involvement in the conspiracy beyond reasonable doubt. The RCMP and the Canadian intelligence agencies are bound to be asked a lot of tough questions following this verdict, which makes a mockery of the marathon investigation into what was regarded as the biggest act of air terrorism before 9/11.

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