Bombing of Air India Flight 182
A bomb destroys Air India Flight 182 off the south-west coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard, most of them Canadian citizens. A second bomb kills two baggage handlers at Narita Airport in Tokyo the same day.
The Boeing 747 left Canada for London and Delhi and broke apart at 31,000 feet. Of the 329 dead, 268 were Canadian citizens, 27 British and 22 Indian. Prosecutors said suitcase bombs were checked in at Vancouver for connecting flights. The Narita bomb, which exploded less than an hour earlier, is thought to have been meant for another Air India flight.
Canadian police suspected Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Babbar Khalsa leader based in Vancouver, but charges against him were dropped. Indian police said they killed him in a gun battle in 1992. The men later tried were alleged to belong to a separatist movement for Khalistan. The McMaster University archive on the case records a view that the bombing was retaliation for Operation Blue Star and November 1984.
Inderjit Singh Reyat was convicted of manslaughter over the Narita bomb, pleaded guilty to manslaughter over Flight 182 in 2003, and was later convicted of perjury. He is the only person convicted. A court acquitted Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri in March 2005, when Justice Ian Josephson found the main witnesses unreliable. Malik was shot dead in Surrey, British Columbia, in July 2022.
A public inquiry under John Major reported on 17 June 2010 and described "a cascading series of errors" on the part of the government, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged those failures that month. CBC describes the bombing as the worst mass murder in Canadian history.[Web][Web][Web][Web]