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http://www.canada.com/national/story.html?id=45826894-6d05-4b13-9f4e-3370ebc7a067
Bagri and Malik found not guilty
March 16, 2005
VANCOUVER (CP) -- Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik both found not guilty in bombing of Air India Flight 182.
About 100 people began lining up outside the B.C. Supreme Court building under tight security and in a steady rain trying to get seats to hear Justice Ian Josephson's verdict.
In the end, the fate of Malik, 58, hung on the stories of a small handful of witnesses who testified against him in the trial by judge alone. The judge said those witnesses were not credible.
Josephson was still to pass judgment on Ajaib Singh Bagri, 55, who along with Malik had faced charges of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder in the downing of Flight 182. They were also charged in an explosion at Japan's Narita airport that killed two baggage handlers on the same day.
There was almost no hard evidence linking Malik, a high-profile Vancouver millionaire, or Bagri, a sawmill worker from Kamloops, B.C., to the bombings.
Josephson found Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri not guilty on all eight charges each man faced, including first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
Malik, 58, and Bagri, 55, had also been charged in an explosion at Japan's Narita airport that killed two baggage handlers on the same day. They were found not guilty of those charges as well.
It has been widely speculated that an appeal of the verdict will be launched in a higher court and family members have called for a public inquiry into the handling of the case.
The list of key witnesses included two former female confidantes of the accused and a convicted murderer.
The destruction of evidence by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, meanwhile, was singled out by the judge for criticism as "unacceptable negligence.''
The two men were accused of blowing up a plane bound for Mumbai from Vancouver via Toronto, Montreal and London in a plot inspired by religious revenge after the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism's holiest shrine, in June 1984.
A third man, Inderjit Singh Reyat, pleaded guilty to manslaughter for his part in the downing of Flight 182, a Boeing 747 operated by India's state-run airline.
Reyat, an electrician from Duncan, B.C., was handed another five-year jail term on top of the 10 years he was serving on manslaughter and explosives charges related to the Narita bombing.
The Crown argued that after the attack on the Golden Temple, Vancouver's large ex-pat Sikh community was bubbling with rage, which those at the heart of the plot exploited.
Bagri and Malik, prosecutors argued, obsessed over terrorist plots to create a Sikh homeland in India. The two belonged to groups, since outlawed in Canada, that blamed the Indian government for mistreating Sikhs.
The suspected mastermind of the plot was Talwinder Singh Parmar, prosecutors told the trial, which was held in a specially built multimillion-dollar courtroom with protective glass separating the accused and lawyers from the public gallery.
Like other alleged co-conspirators and insiders, Parmar is dead. He was killed in a shootout with Indian police in 1992.
Reyat said Parmar asked him to get components to build a bomb that would be detonated in India, but he was never told they would be used to bring down a plane.
At the end of the 233-day trial, the Crown and defence agreed that the credibility of a woman whom Malik confided in was pivotal in the case against him.
She stepped out of her life of hiding in the witness protection program to tell the court Malik confessed to organizing a plan to smuggle two bombs on Vancouver flights that would be transferred to two Air India jets.
The plan, she said, was for the explosives, hidden in suitcases, to detonate at the same time while the planes soared on opposite sides of the world.
But things didn't go according to plan, according to the woman.
One bomb blew up on schedule, shattering Flight 182 as it flew off the coast of Ireland.
The second device detonated prematurely, killing the two baggage workers in Tokyo. The bomb _ which went off 54 minutes before Flight 182 fell from the sky _ was supposed to be transferred in luggage from a Canadian Airlines flight from Vancouver to another Air India jet destined for Delhi via Bangkok.
Although the woman said she and Malik fell in love, there was no evidence of a physical affair between them. The confidante is among 10 protected witnesses who cannot be identified.
The court heard that Malik, a businessman in the strict Sikh community, poured his heart out to her in April 1986.
She said that Malik told her: "We had Air India crash. Nobody, I mean nobody, can do anything. It is all for Sikhism.''
In the spring of 1997, Malik went further, she said, and confessed that he was the one who had purchased two airline tickets to fly the bombs in suitcases out of Vancouver.
Malik's defence team dismissed the woman as a disgruntled former employee of the businessman who had been fired.
"She had bitterness, anger and hatefulness toward Malik and others,'' defence lawyer David Crossin told the court, adding that without her evidence, ``the case against Malik vanishes.''
The same 20-year-old memories of second-hand confessions swirled around Bagri, Malik's alleged logistics man.
Bagri was heavily involved in the movement to create Khalistan, the independent homeland some Sikhs wanted, and called for followers of the religion to take up arms during speeches.
Bagri was described by prosecutor Bob Wright as "a militant Sikh terrorist.'' The court watched videotapes of Bagri rallying his people with violent slogans.
"Until we kill 50,000 Hindus we will not rest,'' he preached at a massive gathering of Sikhs in Madison Square Garden in New York in July 1984.
In September 1985, Bagri allegedly admitted to a man in the United States that he was responsible for the bombings.
The man was a mole for the FBI and was later paid about $460,000 by the RCMP to testify at the trial. The cash was paid out after the man, known only as John, had told American police about the confession.
Bagri's lawyers tried to discredit the informant as a criminal who was looking for money, noting that he spent time in jail after his brother was killed in a machete attack in India and that he lied to immigration officials to get into the U.S.
The Crown said the brother was killed when John stepped in to the middle of a family brawl and, in protecting himself, he caused the fatal stab wound.
The death of Parmar meant an already cold trail in the investigation into the bombing would sink into the deep freeze.
Court heard that CSIS had been following Parmar, Malik and Bagri but weren't able to come up with anything.
Important notes and tips were destroyed instead of being shared with the RCMP in a clash of personalities between officers and supervisors in the two security organizations. Information on suspects was further buried in turf wars.
Bagri's lawyer Michael Code was critical of CSIS, Canada's spy agency, when it emerged that wiretap and interview tapes against his client had been erased. While some translations of the telephone conversations survived, Code described them as cryptic, inconsistent and unreliable.
The erased interview tape was of a woman who told a CSIS agent that Bagri tried to borrow her car to take bomb-laden baggage to Vancouver's airport.
In court, the woman complained of memory loss around Bagri's actions and what she told the CSIS agent.
Justice Josephson later allowed the agent's notes of his conversations with the woman to be used as evidence against Bagri.
Only 132 bodies from Flight 182 were recovered by military and merchant vessels that worked on the recovery effort.
© Canadian Press 2005
Wow, I don't know about the rest of you, but this was a huge surprise to me.
Bagri and Malik found not guilty
March 16, 2005
VANCOUVER (CP) -- Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik both found not guilty in bombing of Air India Flight 182.
About 100 people began lining up outside the B.C. Supreme Court building under tight security and in a steady rain trying to get seats to hear Justice Ian Josephson's verdict.
In the end, the fate of Malik, 58, hung on the stories of a small handful of witnesses who testified against him in the trial by judge alone. The judge said those witnesses were not credible.
Josephson was still to pass judgment on Ajaib Singh Bagri, 55, who along with Malik had faced charges of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder in the downing of Flight 182. They were also charged in an explosion at Japan's Narita airport that killed two baggage handlers on the same day.
There was almost no hard evidence linking Malik, a high-profile Vancouver millionaire, or Bagri, a sawmill worker from Kamloops, B.C., to the bombings.
Josephson found Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri not guilty on all eight charges each man faced, including first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
Malik, 58, and Bagri, 55, had also been charged in an explosion at Japan's Narita airport that killed two baggage handlers on the same day. They were found not guilty of those charges as well.
It has been widely speculated that an appeal of the verdict will be launched in a higher court and family members have called for a public inquiry into the handling of the case.
The list of key witnesses included two former female confidantes of the accused and a convicted murderer.
The destruction of evidence by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, meanwhile, was singled out by the judge for criticism as "unacceptable negligence.''
The two men were accused of blowing up a plane bound for Mumbai from Vancouver via Toronto, Montreal and London in a plot inspired by religious revenge after the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism's holiest shrine, in June 1984.
A third man, Inderjit Singh Reyat, pleaded guilty to manslaughter for his part in the downing of Flight 182, a Boeing 747 operated by India's state-run airline.
Reyat, an electrician from Duncan, B.C., was handed another five-year jail term on top of the 10 years he was serving on manslaughter and explosives charges related to the Narita bombing.
The Crown argued that after the attack on the Golden Temple, Vancouver's large ex-pat Sikh community was bubbling with rage, which those at the heart of the plot exploited.
Bagri and Malik, prosecutors argued, obsessed over terrorist plots to create a Sikh homeland in India. The two belonged to groups, since outlawed in Canada, that blamed the Indian government for mistreating Sikhs.
The suspected mastermind of the plot was Talwinder Singh Parmar, prosecutors told the trial, which was held in a specially built multimillion-dollar courtroom with protective glass separating the accused and lawyers from the public gallery.
Like other alleged co-conspirators and insiders, Parmar is dead. He was killed in a shootout with Indian police in 1992.
Reyat said Parmar asked him to get components to build a bomb that would be detonated in India, but he was never told they would be used to bring down a plane.
At the end of the 233-day trial, the Crown and defence agreed that the credibility of a woman whom Malik confided in was pivotal in the case against him.
She stepped out of her life of hiding in the witness protection program to tell the court Malik confessed to organizing a plan to smuggle two bombs on Vancouver flights that would be transferred to two Air India jets.
The plan, she said, was for the explosives, hidden in suitcases, to detonate at the same time while the planes soared on opposite sides of the world.
But things didn't go according to plan, according to the woman.
One bomb blew up on schedule, shattering Flight 182 as it flew off the coast of Ireland.
The second device detonated prematurely, killing the two baggage workers in Tokyo. The bomb _ which went off 54 minutes before Flight 182 fell from the sky _ was supposed to be transferred in luggage from a Canadian Airlines flight from Vancouver to another Air India jet destined for Delhi via Bangkok.
Although the woman said she and Malik fell in love, there was no evidence of a physical affair between them. The confidante is among 10 protected witnesses who cannot be identified.
The court heard that Malik, a businessman in the strict Sikh community, poured his heart out to her in April 1986.
She said that Malik told her: "We had Air India crash. Nobody, I mean nobody, can do anything. It is all for Sikhism.''
In the spring of 1997, Malik went further, she said, and confessed that he was the one who had purchased two airline tickets to fly the bombs in suitcases out of Vancouver.
Malik's defence team dismissed the woman as a disgruntled former employee of the businessman who had been fired.
"She had bitterness, anger and hatefulness toward Malik and others,'' defence lawyer David Crossin told the court, adding that without her evidence, ``the case against Malik vanishes.''
The same 20-year-old memories of second-hand confessions swirled around Bagri, Malik's alleged logistics man.
Bagri was heavily involved in the movement to create Khalistan, the independent homeland some Sikhs wanted, and called for followers of the religion to take up arms during speeches.
Bagri was described by prosecutor Bob Wright as "a militant Sikh terrorist.'' The court watched videotapes of Bagri rallying his people with violent slogans.
"Until we kill 50,000 Hindus we will not rest,'' he preached at a massive gathering of Sikhs in Madison Square Garden in New York in July 1984.
In September 1985, Bagri allegedly admitted to a man in the United States that he was responsible for the bombings.
The man was a mole for the FBI and was later paid about $460,000 by the RCMP to testify at the trial. The cash was paid out after the man, known only as John, had told American police about the confession.
Bagri's lawyers tried to discredit the informant as a criminal who was looking for money, noting that he spent time in jail after his brother was killed in a machete attack in India and that he lied to immigration officials to get into the U.S.
The Crown said the brother was killed when John stepped in to the middle of a family brawl and, in protecting himself, he caused the fatal stab wound.
The death of Parmar meant an already cold trail in the investigation into the bombing would sink into the deep freeze.
Court heard that CSIS had been following Parmar, Malik and Bagri but weren't able to come up with anything.
Important notes and tips were destroyed instead of being shared with the RCMP in a clash of personalities between officers and supervisors in the two security organizations. Information on suspects was further buried in turf wars.
Bagri's lawyer Michael Code was critical of CSIS, Canada's spy agency, when it emerged that wiretap and interview tapes against his client had been erased. While some translations of the telephone conversations survived, Code described them as cryptic, inconsistent and unreliable.
The erased interview tape was of a woman who told a CSIS agent that Bagri tried to borrow her car to take bomb-laden baggage to Vancouver's airport.
In court, the woman complained of memory loss around Bagri's actions and what she told the CSIS agent.
Justice Josephson later allowed the agent's notes of his conversations with the woman to be used as evidence against Bagri.
Only 132 bodies from Flight 182 were recovered by military and merchant vessels that worked on the recovery effort.
© Canadian Press 2005
Wow, I don't know about the rest of you, but this was a huge surprise to me.
