Air India Flight 182 : Terror in the sky

Air India Flight 182 : Terror in the sky

It was early morning when a Boeing 747 was approaching the west coast of Ireland. While cruising at an altitude of 31,000 feet, the plane disappeared from the ATC radar screen. The plane suffered a sudden decompression. It disintegrated and slammed into the Atlantic Ocean killing everyone on board.

Investigation

22 June 1985

Vancouver International Airport

13:30 UTC

A man named Manjit Singh checked in as M. Singh called to confirm his reservations on Flight 182. The agent refused his request because his seat from Toronto to Bombay was not confirmed. He insisted, but the agent again refused him. The man said, "Wait, I'll get my brother for you." As he started to walk away, she agreed to accept the bag.

The agent checked his suitcase and transferred it to Air India Flight 181. CP Air Flight 60 departed for Toronto without Singh.

Flight 60 arrived in Toronto. Some of the passengers and baggage, including the suitcase of M.Singh, had checked in and transferred to Flight 182. When the suitcase of M. Singh was passing through the machine, the sniffer was heard to beep. It beeped in a low volume. The officers did not inform Air India because they were not instructed on how to react to such a short beep.

Investigators zeroed in on Inderjit Singh Reyat, Talwinder Singh Parmar, Ajaib Singh Bagri, and a man named Surjan Singh Gill. The search warrants were executed at the homes of suspects in November 1985. But the only charges laid were minor ones against Parmar and Reyat involving possession of explosives for the bomb tests. The charges against Parmar were later dropped, while Reyat received a $2,000 fine for possessing explosives.

How the plan was executed?

Parmar was the founder of Babbar Khalsa. It was a militant Sikh extremist group. The organization aimed to create the independent Republic of Khalistan in what is now India’s Punjab State. In 1981, India charged Parmar with murdering a policeman, which forced him to flee back to Canada. There, he visited Inderjit Singh Reyat, who was an auto mechanic and electrician living on Vancouver Island. Parmar asked Reyat to construct a bomb.

8 May 1985

Reyat bought a Micronta digital automobile clock from a store in Duncan. After a week, he returned to the store to buy an electrical relay to get the buzzer signal to power another device. During that time, Wiretappers recorded nine phone calls between Reyat and Parmar's residence. Due to this activity, the government added Reyat to the list of persons being monitored for terrorist activities. Later he visited a television repair shop, seeking help for a partially disassembled car clock wired to a lantern battery. The next day, he purchased a Sanyo component tuner and left his name and telephone number on the charge slip. He also bought smokeless gunpowder from a sporting goods store, signing "I. Reyat" on the explosives log.

June 4, 1985

CSIS agents followed Parmar, where he was watching a test explosion. The person who demonstrated the experimental device was Inderjit Singh Reyat.

Johal was suspected of involvement in several aspects of these bombings. The number of his former home was used while purchasing tickets for the two terrorists who carried out the attack. Johal was spotted at Vancouver International Airport by his fellow Sikhs whose families perished in the air disaster.

When the investigators studied the debris from Narita. They found the bomb had been housed inside a Sanyo tuner with a serial number matching a model sold only in British Columbia and used a Micronta clock as a timer, which powered a relay with a 12-volt battery to trigger blasting caps to set off a high explosive consistent with sticks of dynamite, all matching items purchased by Reyat.

Parmar returned to India and was killed in a gunfight with Punjab Police on 15 October 1992. He has later named the mastermind of the 1985 bombing.

On November 15, 2002, Johal died of natural causes at the age of 55.

Reyat moved his family to England in 1986. Later he was charged and extradited to Canada and convicted of manslaughter in the Narita bombing. He received a 10 year sentence. In June 2001 Reyat was charged with the Air India deaths and on Feb. 10, 2003, he pleaded guilty. He was released to a halfway house in 2016 and has now been fully released with some restrictions since early 2017.

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