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Bail denied to suspects in 1985 bombing of A-I flight
A judge denied bail on Wednesday for two Sikh men accused of the 1985 bombing that killed 329 people on an Air India flight. Justice Patrick Dohm issued his ruling after a five-day bail hearing in December for Ripudaman Singh Malik, a Vancouver businessman, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, a mill worker in Kamloops, British Columbia.
A judge denied bail on Wednesday for two Sikh men accused of the 1985 bombing that killed 329 people on an Air India flight. Justice Patrick Dohm issued his ruling after a five-day bail hearing in December for Ripudaman Singh Malik, a Vancouver businessman, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, a mill worker in Kamloops, British Columbia.
They each face first-degree murder charges in the bombing of Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland and an almost simultaneous bomb explosion at a Tokyo airport that killed two baggage handlers.
Bagri, 51, and Malik, 53, were arrested on October 27 on suspicion of planning and carrying out the June 23, 1985, bomb blast that killed all 329 people aboard Flight 182 from Montreal to New Delhi, with a planned stop in London.
Most of the victims were Canadian, and the death toll is the highest ever from the terrorist bombing of an airplane. They also were charged with the murders of two baggage handlers killed by a bomb explosion at Tokyo's Narita airport an hour before Flight 182 went down.
The airport bomb was in baggage headed for Air India Flight 301, and Bagri and Malik also were charged with the attempted murder of that flight's passengers and crew.
In addition, Bagri is charged in a 1988 assassination attempt of Tara Singh Hayer, who published the Indo-Canadian Times newspaper and was a critic of Sikh extremists. Hayer was murdered 10 years after the assassination attempt, and police are still investigating the case. Police named two other men as unindicted co-conspirators in the bombing plot.
One of them, Talwinder Singh Parmar, led the militant Sikh separatist group Babbar Khalsa that seeks an autonomous state called Khalistan in what is now Punjab in India.
Parmar was killed by Indian police in October 1992. The other, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was convicted of manslaughter in 1991 and sentenced to 10 years for his role in the Narita airport bombing.
The Air India bombing occurred a year after the Indian army attacked the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984. The 15-year investigation of the Air India bombings is the largest and most expensive undertaken by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with the total cost estimated to exceed $ 20 million.
Bureau Report