GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD FOR REYAT
Tuesday February 11, 2003
VANCOUVER –
He
continues to be in denial of his full role in making the bombs that cost a
total of 331 lives but Inderjit Singh Reyat still gets a card to get out
of jail in five years or less.
Reyat, a 51-year-old who
holds dual British and Canadian citizenship, has now accepted he aided and
abetted those responsible for carrying out history’s worst bomb explosion
aboard a civilian plane. But now he says he did not make any bombs. And he
also does not know who made them.
He claims he gave bomb making parts to
someone else. We believe that is a misleading statement and flies in the
face of all the evidence accumulated by police in a 17-year investigation.
And his continued denial of his role in
making the bomb or even knowing that anyone planned to blow up two Air
India planes in different parts of the world is unlikely to help the crown
even if he is called as a witness, Flight182.com believes.
A man who allows a court to be misled
once is unlikely to help the crown in any future actions. He has relied on
his interviews in Nov. 1985 with the police to accept that he was asked to
make bombs by Talwinder Singh Parmar - chief of the Babbar Khalsa
terrorist group. These bombs Parmar wanted were allegedly to be used to
blow up bridges, or a car or something "heavy" in India. A car bomb? That
has never surfaced as an idea in our minds.
And of course, Reyat had no idea
whether the bombs would be sent to India by airplane or by ship or on the
backs of some mules.
As well, his denials fly in the face of
the following facts that show that a reasonable jury, properly
instructed, would have most likely convicted him of knowingly
participating in a plot to blow up two Air India jets on the ground.
Evidence shows:
-
He purchased the tuner that blew up
in Tokyo on June 23, 1985 en-route to being boarded on Air India Flight
301. He bought it at a Woolworth store in Duncan, BC, where he lived.
-
He bought two Micronta electronic
timer devices from Radio Shack.
-
He even convinced his friend Ken
Slade to give him dynamite. Slade had no idea what Reyat intended to do
and fully believed what Reyat told him - that they would be used to
clear some land.
-
He purchased or acquired green tape
of the type found in the Tokyo bomb.
-
Police found gunpowder and dynamite
in his home after the Air India explosion.
-
A total of nine items which were
found in the Tokyo bomb were similar to items he had acquired.
-
On June 4, 1985, he took Parmar to a
bush area near Duncan on Vancouver Island and demonstrated his ability
to detonate an explosive.
-
He watched demolitions and suggested
he could make remote control devices to cause detonation.
-
He acquired a manual on blasting.
-
He traveled from Vancouver Island to
Vancouver one day before the bombs were to be boarded on flights leaving
from Vancouver.
-
And as one bomb was being boarded in
Vancouver, Reyat purchased a battery at an auto-electric store in
Vancouver on Saturday, June 22, 1985. He even asked for an employee
discount.
Police have never found another man
with any bomb making know-how despite a 17-year investigation of Reyat's
links. If another man made the bombs, why would he not get his own parts?
Why would Reyat have to buy them?
Despite all this evidence, the crown
allowed Reyat to plead guilty to manslaughter and all he gets to spend in
jail is five years. He would be eligible for parole in 18 months.
The deal was made official on Monday as
Reyat
stood silently in a Vancouver court and offered a guilty plea to a single
count of the manslaughter of 329 people who perished aboard Air India
Flight 182 when the jet exploded over the Atlantic some 200 kilometres off
the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985.
His lawyer, David
Gibbons, told court Reyat was sorrowful about the deaths which occurred as
a result of his procurement of bomb making parts which allowed others to
make the explosive device. We did not hear of this alleged sorrow from
Reyat's mouth - but we saw him pumping hands and smiling.
He was sentenced to ten
years in 1991 after being convicted of two counts of manslaughter in
relation to the bomb explosion at Tokyo’s Narita Airport on the same day
that Air India Flight 182 blew up. At that time the crown absolutely and
categorically asserted Reyat made the bomb. That the bomb contained his
signature - a can of automotive starting fluid. Reyat was a mechanic.
The bomb explosion in
Tokyo killed two Japanese baggage handlers.
Evidence submitted in
the Narita-Tokyo bombings showed Reyat demonstrated a bush experiment in
explosives to Babbar Khalsa terrorist group leader Talwinder Singh Parmar
on June 4, 1985 – just 18 days before the bombings. The Canadian Security
Intelligence Service said at the time that it was following Parmar when
Reyat, Parmar and a third man went to bush areas near Duncan on Vancouver
Island. There, agents heard a loud explosion and later checks by the RCMP
confirmed a small explosive went off in the bush.
There was also evidence
that on the day the two bag bombs were checked in at Vancouver Airport on
June 22, 1985, Reyat had traveled to Vancouver from his Duncan home. There
were multiple telephone calls between Reyat’s home and the home of Hardial
Singh Johal – a former president of the Vancouver Sikh Temple who was
arrested twice during the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation
into the bombings.
A telephone number
related to Johal had turned up on ticket bookings for two Singhs who
failed to board their flights out of Vancouver after checking in their
bags.
Parmar, the founder of
the Babbar Khalsa terrorist group, was killed during an encounter with
Indian police in October 1992 inside the Punjab.
Johal, an associate of
Parmar and Reyat, recently died of natural causes before he could be
brought to justice.
The crown – which
continues to prosecute Sikh preacher Ajaib Singh Bagri and Vancouver
millionaire Ripudaman Singh Malik on charges connected to the Air India
bombing – is now free to call Reyat as a witness in the ongoing court
cases.
But it is our opinion that a man who is
in denial is unlikely to be a reliable witness. He can always blame dead
people.
Written by Salim Jiwa
Author of "The Death of Air india Flight 182"
auth@flight182.com
|
