Air India perjurer Inderjit Singh Reyat granted release to halfway house
Posted January 26, 2016 4:06 pm.
Last Updated January 26, 2016 6:04 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER – The only person convicted in the 1985 Air India bombings has been granted a statutory release from prison to a halfway house.
Inderjit Singh Reyat was charged with perjury in 2006 for repeatedly lying during his testimony at a trial into the bombing deaths of 331 people, mostly Canadians.
Reyat was found guilty in 2010 and sentenced to a record nine years in prison, or seven years and seven months after accounting for time served.
Under the law, offenders must be granted statutory release after they have served two thirds of their sentence.
Reyat must abide by several conditions as part of his release, including not possessing any extremist propaganda or possessing any components used to build an explosive device.
Bal Gupta, whose wife Ramwati died aboard Air India Flight 182, says Reyat’s release is a difficult reality of the justice system for families who lost loved ones so long ago.
“This is justice taking its course and whether we are happy with it or not that’s a different issue,” says Gupta, of the Air India Families Association.
“Life goes on but this kind of pain, it disappears on the face but inside it will go with us when we go,” Gupta says from his home in Toronto.
“Twenty-nine families were completely wiped out — husband, wife, children, they were all gone. Seven couples lost all their children, and some of them are now in their late 60s or even early 70s. He’ll be back with his family but for those people it’s a punishment for a lifetime.”
Passengers aboard Flight 182 had boarded from Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal before heading to New Delhi on June 23, 1985. The plane was ripped apart by a suitcase bomb off the coast of Ireland.
All 329 people aboard the aircraft died. The Crown maintained the suitcase was loaded onto a plane leaving Vancouver’s airport before being transferred to a connecting flight in Toronto.
A second bomb-laden suitcase, destined for another Air India flight, exploded prematurely and killed two baggage handlers in Tokyo.
Ripudaman Singh Malik of Vancouver and Ajaib Singh Bagri of Kamloops, were acquitted in March 2005 of murder and conspiracy charges in the two bombings connected with state-owned Air India.
The Crown maintained they were seeking revenge for the Indian government’s 1984 raid of the Golden Temple as it tried to flush out armed militants from Sikhism’s holiest shrine in Amritsar, India.
Freelance Journalist and Air India Author Salim Jiwa understands this will be hard for victims’ families but says this is what Canadian law allows.
“The political situation that created the Air India bombing has been over for a long time. Since 1992 we have not seen any terrorism from separatists who wanted to carve out an independent state of Khalistan.”
