Canadian Judge Clears 2 in ’85 Air India Bombing

A Canadian judge Wednesday cleared two Sikhs of involvement in the 1985 bombing of an Air India jetliner that killed 329 people, the deadliest such terrorist strike.

British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Ian Bruce Josephson found Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri not guilty of murder and conspiracy in connection with the bombing over the Atlantic, as well as a related explosion at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport that killed two people.

Josephson said the testimony against the two men was not credible.

Members of the victims’ families wept as the judge read the verdicts, which followed a 19-month trial. “Oh my God. Oh my God,” one of them cried. Malik, 58, and Bagri, 55, smiled at their relatives when the hearing ended.

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” and agreed that the bombs that exploded off the Irish coast and in Japan had probably originated in Vancouver.

But he said he could not believe key prosecution witnesses who testified that Malik, a wealthy Vancouver businessman, and Bagri, a British Columbia sawmill worker and Sikh priest, had admitted being involved in the plot.

Prosecutors accused the men of seeking revenge for the Indian army’s 1984 storming of Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in the city of Amritsar. The operation, aimed at ousting militants in the temple, left hundreds of people dead.

The case was made more difficult by problems in the long investigation, including the erasure of wiretaps of the suspects.

A bomb destroyed Flight 182, which was bound from Montreal to New Delhi via London on June 23, 1985. Another bomb had exploded 54 minutes earlier in baggage being transferred at Narita to another Air India flight.

Police say the mastermind of the plot was Talwinder Singh Parmar, a founder of a Sikh militant group, who was killed by Indian police in 1992.

Malik and Bagri, who deny involvement in the plot, were arrested in October 2000.

Prosecutors have 30 days to decide whether to appeal.