CANADA: A Canadian judge cleared two Sikh militants yesterday of involvement in the 1985 downing of an Air India flight off the Irish coast, history's deadliest bombing of a civilian airliner, ruling the testimony against them was not credible.
British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Bruce Ian Josephson found Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri not guilty of murder and conspiracy charges in the bombing and a related explosion at a Japanese airport.
Members of the victims' families wept in the Vancouver courtroom as the judge read the verdicts following a 19-month trial. Mr Malik (58) and Mr Bagri (55) smiled at their own family members.
"Oh my God. Oh my God," one of the victims' relatives cried to herself.
One mid-air explosion off Ireland killed all 329 people on board Air India flight 182. The other bomb exploded in luggage at Tokyo's Narita airport and killed two workers.
Judge Josephson, who heard 115 witnesses during one of the most complicated and costly cases in Canadian history, called the bombing "fanaticism at its basest and most inhumane level". But he said he could not believe key prosecution witnesses who testified that Mr Bagri and Mr Malik admitted their roles in the plot, and ruled that justice would not be served if there was any doubt of the defendants' guilt.
More than 70 relatives of the bombing victims came from around the world to hear the verdict, delivered in a specially built high-security court.
Relatives and supporters of Mr Malik, a wealthy Vancouver businessman, and Mr Bagri, a Kamloops, British Columbia, sawmill worker and Sikh priest, were also in attendance.
"I cannot believe the verdict. All those witnesses would not have come forward and risked their lives. All those poor families. Not in a million years did I think this could happen," said Jeanne Bakermans, a former Canadian Pacific Airlines ticket agent and a witness in the case.
Prosecutors accused the two men of wanting revenge for the Indian army's 1984 storming of Sikhism's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in the city of Amritsar. That operation, aimed at ousting militants in the temple, left hundreds of people dead.
The Indian-born Sikh separatists living in western Canada, were charged with planning to destroy two aircraft simultaneously, with one going down over the Atlantic Ocean and the other over the Pacific, according to police. One bomb destroyed flight 182 while it was on its way from Canada to London, and then to India, on June 23rd, 1985, killing everyone on board. The other bomb exploded 54 minutes earlier in luggage being transferred at Narita airport to Air India flight 301, killing two workers and injuring four others.
Both men were arrested in October 2000.
The defence acknowledged there may have been a conspiracy, but they denied that Mr Bagri and Mr Malik were part of it. They were originally scheduled to be tried with Inderjit Singh Reyat, but he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge. Reyat was called as a witness, but denied knowing who asked him to help make the bombs.
In his ruling, the judge referred to Reyat as "an unmitigated liar", whose testimony "bordered on the absurd". Police say the mastermind was Talwinder Singh Parmar, a founder of the Sikh militant group Babbar Khalsa, who was killed by Indian police in October 1992.
The prosecution's case was made difficult by the Canadian security intelligence service's decision in the late 1980s to destroy wiretaps it made of the suspects before and after the bombings.
While there were calls for an inquiry into the incident, the Canadian government said this was unlikely: "I would have to be convinced that after a year of evidence and over 120 witnesses that there is anything to be gained that could be learned ... from a public inquiry," Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan told reporters.- (Reuters)