Investigation brings charges in 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329

Two men of Sikh origin were arrested and charged Friday with killing 329 people in the 1985 bombing of an Air India jumbo jet near Ireland and two baggage handlers killed by another bomb in Tokyo. The charges amount to Canada's biggest mass murder case and came after what one officer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police called one of the largest, most complex investigations in the force's history. Air India Flight 182 from Montreal to New Delhi, with a planned stop in London, went down off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, killing all 329 people aboard. The same day, a bomb exploded in luggage heading for another Air India flight in Tokyo, killing the two baggage handlers. Canadian investigators have long suspected Sikh militants of planting the bombs in revenge for India's 1984 raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the seat of faith for India's Sikh minority.

A Sikh man is serving a 10-year sentence in Canada for his involvement in the Tokyo explosion. The RCMP identified the two men arrested Friday as Ripudaman Singh Malik, 53, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, 51. Both were charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, conspiring to cause bombs to be put on aircraft and causing a bomb to be placed on an aircraft. The charges accuse them of planning and carrying out the two bombings, and causing 331 deaths _ 329 on Flight 182 and the two Tokyo baggage handlers. They also were charged with conspiring to kill all the people on both flights. Investigators said both bombs originated or were placed on flights originating from Vancouver, and the conspiracy took place in British Columbia, assistant commander Beverly Busson said. Malik, who came to Canada from India in 1972 and built up major business holdings in Vancouver, headed a credit union and school where relatives of Sikh militant Talwinder Singh Parmar have worked.

Parmar was the founder and leader of the Babbar Khalsa or Tigers of True Faith, a group dedicated to the creation of Khalistan from India's Punjab state. He was killed in a 1992 shootout with Indian police, and was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in Friday's charges. Bagri was arrested in Kamloops, about 120 miles northeast of Vancouver, where he worked in a mill, according to the RCMP. He also was charged Friday with the 1988 attempted murder of Indo-Canadian Times newspaper publisher Tara Singh Hayer, who was shot to death 10 years later in a killing that remains unsolved. Due to the length and cost of the investigation, the police had been criticized for failing to arrest any suspects. In 1998, a team of prosecutors received an initial police report on possible charges. The prosecution team was more than doubled last year. Canadians will "finally heave a sigh of relief that the largest crime, the most significant crime in the history of Canada, is going to be finally dealt with," said British Columbia Premier Ujjal Dosanjh. Dosanjh, Canada's first Indo-Canadian premier, was an attorney general of the province during the investigation. British Columbia is home to about half of Canada's 200,000 Sikhs.

Rajwant Singh, president of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education _ a Washington-based think tank for the Sikh community in North America _ said his council "strongly condemns" the actions of the arrested men "if found guilty." "Any such employment of violence for political ends is totally against Sikh teachings and values," he said in a statement. The Air India bombing killed more people than the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground.

(sda)