Arrests In 1985 Air India Bombing
Canadian police said Friday they have arrested two suspects in connection with the 1985 bombing of an Air India airliner off the coast of Ireland, which killed 329 people.
They are the first arrests made in connection with the bombing, the deadliest-ever act of aviation sabotage.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the charges in the biggest mass-murder case in Canadian history, resulting from a 15-year investigation that was one of the nation's largest ever and cost millions of dollars.
A spokeswoman for the RCMP identified the men as Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malick. She said the investigation is continuing and more arrests are possible.
Charges against the men include first degree murder, attempted murder and conspiracy. Police also brought murder charges in connection with a second bomb explosion the same day at Tokyo's Narita Airport that killed two baggage handlers. The baggage was being transferred to an Air India flight from a flight from Canada when the explosion occurred.
Air India Flight 182 from Toronto to New Delhi via London blew up off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, killing everyone on board.
Authorities have said they believe the explosion that the destroyed Flight 182 and the other at Narita 54 minutes later, were the work of Sikh extremists.
The 1985 bombings were thought to be intended, in part, to avenge the Indian Army's 1984 storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar — Sikhism's holiest shrine. That attack killed 300.
A spokesman at the Indian High Commission in Ottawa declined comment Friday on the investigation.
Authorities have said they believe both bombs were built in British Columbia and placed in luggage originally put on planes in Vancouver.
The western Canadian province has a large Sikh community, which at the time of the bombings included supporters of the militant group Babbar Khalsa, or Tigers of True Faith, a group dedicated to the creation of Khalistan, a Sikh separatist state in India's Punjab state.
Canadian investigators believe the Narita bomb was supposed to destroy an Air India flight from Tokyo to Bangkok.
In 1991, electrician Inderjit Singh Reyat from the Vancouver Island community of Duncan was convicted in the Tokyo bombing.
In its Friday afternoon edition, the Vancouver Province newspaper reported that one of the men to be charged was a key lieutenant of Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Sikh militant shot to death by police in India on Oct. 15, 1992. Parmar was the founder and leader of the Babbar Khalsa.
The other suspect was a Vancouver businessman who belongs to a Sikh fundamentalist group, according to the newspaper.
It was not clear which suspect matched which description.
Bagri is also accused of shooting Tara Singh Hayer, the editor of the Indo-Canadian Times and a fierce critic of the use of violence by some Sikh sepaatists.
That attempt failed, leaving Hayer in a wheelchair until he was shot again and killed on November 18, 1998.