INDEPTH: AIR INDIA
The Bombing of Air India Flight 182
Michael McAuliffe and Peter Hadzipetros, CBC News Online | Updated August 27, 2003 June 22, 1985. Airlines agent Jeannie Adams checks in two pieces of luggage at Vancouver International Airport that will change the course of history.

Hours later, the first suitcase explodes inside the baggage terminal at the Tokyo's Narita airport while it was being transferred to an Air India flight. Two baggage handlers are killed. Exactly 55 minutes later, the other bag, a dark-brown hard-sided Samsonite suitcase, explodes in the forward cargo hold of Air India Flight 182 as it approaches the coast of Ireland.

Some passengers actually survive the 747's fall from 31,000 feet only to drown in the frigid waters of the Atlantic.

Three hundred and twenty-nine people are killed. Eighty-two of them are children. Most of the people onboard Air India Flight 182 are Canadian citizens.

Anant Anantaraman lost his wife and two daughters in the Air India tragedy. Both his little girls, he says were very talented violinists. For years after the crash Anant found it impossible to listen to music. Each June he marks the anniversary of their death ... and each June he hopes the nation will remember this was not a foreign tragedy ... most of the victims were Canadians.

"I want the public to remember these people," Anantaraman told CBC News.

Mourners gather on the coast of Ireland to pay their respects to Air India victims

"I would like to see Canadians understand that this is not a local tragedy, it's not a tragedy that happened to me and a few people. I want them to understand it's a national tragedy, which has never been sort of resolved."

Anant has given up on the promises of Canadian police to bring those responsible to justice. In 1998, he says, the RCMP told him that charges were imminent.

Nothing happened publicly in the two years after that. But the investigation picked up steam behind the scenes. Six months later, crown prosecutors were brought on board to begin reviewing the 15 years worth of evidence gathered by police. Soon a team of 14 prosecutors and 20 police officers were at work on the case full-time.

As the investigation headed into the homestretch, police left nothing to chance. They refused to publicly discuss either their theory or possible suspects in the case. Their caution could have stemmed from the fact that aside from being the longest, most complicated and expensive investigation in Canadian history, there was a widespread belief that the investigation was botched from the very beginning.

That's because Canadian authorities were on to the suspects in this case long before the crime was ever committed.

In early 1985, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was getting ready to visit North America. India asked Canada and the United States to keep close tabs on Sikh militants who might pose a security threat. Many Sikhs around the world were furious over the Indian Government's 1984 assault on the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Sikhism's holiest shrine. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney agreed to India's request.

Talwinder Singh Parmar

Security officials placed a British Columbia man named Talwinder Singh Parmar under round-the-clock surveillance. Parmar was the leader of the militant Babbar Khalsa sect, a group committed to the violent establishment of Khalistan, an independent Sikh homeland in the Punjab. Agents followed Parmar's every move, and tapped his phones.

Three weeks before the Air India bombing, agents following Parmar and another man, Inderjit Singh Reyat, into the woods on Vancouver Island. There was a loud bang. But the agents thought little of it. Later, most of Parmar's taped telephone conversations were erased before anyone ever listened to them.

Inderjit Singh Reyat

Two days before the bombings, police say a man of East Indian descent went to the Canadian Pacific Airlines ticket office in downtown Vancouver. He paid cash for two tickets. Both were registered under the last name "Singh." One ticket was booked to go to the Narita airport in Tokyo and then on to India. The other ticket was booked from Vancouver to connect with Air India Flight 182 flying out of Toronto.

Police believe that man, whoever he was, was working with Parmar and a group of others. But in one of the biggest gaffes of the case, there was no surveillance on Parmar the day police believe the bombs were delivered to the Vancouver airport.

In the aftermath of the bombings, the pressure was on to lay charges fast.

Within a few months, RCMP officers raided the homes of a half-dozen prominent Sikhs in British Columbia. Charges were laid against two men: Talwinder Singh Parmar and Inderjit Singh Reyat, the mechanic Parmar had visited on Vancouver Island. They were charged with minor weapons offences, but the police left no doubt as to why these suspects were being charged. They told a news conference that the raids and arrests were made as part of the investigation into the Narita Airport blast and the downing of Air India Flight 182.

The police, however, had acted prematurely. The charges against Parmar were dropped. Reyat was fined $2,000 and released. In exchange for that little piece of justice, the police had publicly shown their hand to their key suspects in the case.

For the next 15 years, the Air India investigation languished. The most police were able to manage was the 1991 conviction of Inderjit Singh Reyat in the Narita bombing case. Police presented evidence-linking components of the bomb remains found in Tokyo with items Reyat had purchased in the preceding weeks. Among them, a Sanyo stereo tuner that police believe housed the Narita bomb.

Reyat is serving 10 years for manslaughter in the deaths of the two baggage handlers at the Tokyo airport. He insists he's innocent.

"I never deny buying some items," Reyat told CBC News. "I bought the tuner right and gave it to someone else. I don't know what happened after that. But I did not make the bomb or know of anybody who asked me to make a bomb."

Reyat himself is able to provide one of the most interesting glimpses inside the police investigation over the past few years. Ultimately, police have always hoped to lay conspiracy charges against everyone involved in the Air India bombing. The best way to do that is with the co-operation of one of the conspirators and Reyat says police have offered him just about everything in exchange for this co-operation.

Reyat says he was offered $1,000,000 for his testimony. That's the amount of the reward police have offered for information leading to convictions in the case. Presumably, the same offer has been made to the half dozen or so other suspect's police have in mind.

Defence lawyer David Gibbons has at one time as represented Parmar, Reyat and a number of other suspected Sikh terrorists in Canada. He hopes police would think twice before basing any Air India prosecution on bought testimony.

"You could get a lot of people to say anything for that kind of money," Gibbons told CBC News. "You can't buy evidence in our system of justice and get away with it unless it's corroborated by other evidence. But I think more important it demonstrated that the police really needed something badly, they didn't have their case, they didn't have the evidence gathered and they were trying to get it anyway they could."

Nevertheless, in October, 2000 charges were laid against Sikh cleric Ajaib Singh Bagri and millionaire businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik. Bagri, from Kamloops, B.C., and Malik, from Vancouver, were charged with murder, attempted murder and conspiracy.

Then on June 04, 2001 the British government agreed to allow Canadian authorities to charge Inderjit Singh Reyat in connection with the bombing. As a British citizen already extradited to Canada for his trial on the Narita charges, Britain had to agree before these further charges could go ahead.

After the British courts approved a waiver of extradition rights, RCMP formally arrested Reyat on seven new charges including, murder, attempted murder, conspiracy in the Air India bombing, and the explosion at Tokyo's Narita Airport.

The authorities have been gearing up for the largest prosecution in Canadian history. The trial, like the investigation before it, is likely to be a judicial record-breaker. Pre-trial arguments over the admissibility of evidence such as wiretaps, or material that spent months sitting on the ocean floor, could take more than a year. The trial could last two to three years.

So far, the trial has faced one setback after another. The RCMP's key suspect is no longer alive. Talwinder Singh Parmar died in 1992 under suspicious circumstances, the result of an alleged gun battle with Indian police. Problems with Reyat's defence team have forced the trial to be postponed twice.

It took months before Reyat was appointed a lawyer. David Martin finally came on in September 2001. A few months later, the presiding judge postponed the trial from February 2002 to November 2002, in order to include Reyat's trial with Malik's and Bagri's.

In May 2002, the trial was postponed to March 2003 after most of the lawyers on Reyat's defence team resigned because of alleged fraudulent billing by Reyat's children. Two of Reyat's adult children had been employed to do clerical work on the case.

Shortly after the resignations, Reyat's former defence lawyer, Gibbons, took over as lead lawyer. Gibbons defended Reyat at his 1991 trial for manslaughter in the deaths of two Japanese baggage handlers killed by a bomb at the Narita Airport.

Then on February 10, 2003, in a dramatic turn of events, Reyat pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter and a charge of aiding in the construction of a bomb. All other charges against him were stayed and he was sentenced to five years in jail for his role. He had been charged with the murder of the 329 people. His guilty plea raised speculation that he would testify against the other two.

The outcome doesn't matter for one Canadian who lost his family. Anant Anantaraman says he no longer cares.

"It doesn't make any difference, I swear," Anantaraman told CBC News. "I'm totally indifferent to this, whether they catch, whether they find, whether they punish. It doesn't matter to me at all. Because after all what has happened to me and what has happened to others, it cannot be reversed."