Margin of Terror (2006) -- A book that is worth reading. It's by Salim Jiwa who wrote the earlier book The Death of Air India flight 182. Salim's investigations resulted in threats of elimination being issued aginst him. 

-- Edited by karatecatman at 16:23, 2006-06-22

(Copyright Salim Jiwa)

For more details on the Air India 182 "Kanishka" bombing, visit this URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_182

Jail???

I wud want to c them hanged to death for those lives they took

Canada remembers Air India victims, stones laid for memorials

Toronto, June 24 (PTI)

Teary-eyed relatives of the 329 victims of Air India bombing marked the 21st anniversary of the disaster with ceremonies across Canada and broke ground for memorials for their loved ones, two days after a fresh judicial probe started into the country’s worst terror strike. Foundation stone for a memorial was laid yesterday near the banks of Lake Ontario, Toronto, to honour victims, many of them Indians, who perished when a bomb exploded in Air India Flight 182 ’Kanishka’ off the Irish coast. Similar memorials would be built in Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. The memorial - a sundial at the foot of a wall bearing the names of the victims - is based on a similar structure in Ahakista, Ireland, and is expected to take a year to complete. It will include a walkway and a rock garden. Such memorials for Kanishka victims are being built for the first time in Canada, although there are commemorative plaques in Ottawa and at the Ontario legislature in Toronto. Jayashee Thampi, whose husband and daughter were killed on the Montreal-London flight, took part in the foundation laying ceremony here along with Peter Van Loan, Parliamentary Secretary to Foreign Minister Peter Mackay and Mike Colle, Ontario Minister of Citizenship. Thampi, head of the Air India 182 Victims’ Families Association Memorial Committee, said the time was right for a permanent structure to remember the victims. ‘‘We’ve always had a small memorial at Queen’s Park and we appreciated it, but we always felt it did not do justice to the magnitude of the tragedy itself,’’ she said. A judicial probe into the bombing began work on Wednesday, nearly two years after a court acquitted the two main accused, Sikh separatists Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=e8ffeb1b-2181-4919-99f6-23f98357aa85&k=93412
Head of Air India inquiry wonders if racism was factor in response to bombing
Former Supreme Court justice John Major, head of the Air India Inquiry, listens to testimony at the inquiry in Ottawa, Wednesday, Oct.4, 2006. Major is raising the question of whether racism, conscious or unconscious, may have played a role in public and government reaction to the 1985 bombing of an Air India that took 329 lives.
Photograph by : CP PHOTO/Fred Chartrand   

Jim Brown, The Canadian Press
Published: Wednesday, October 04, 2006
OTTAWA -- The head of the Air India inquiry is raising the question of whether racism, conscious or unconscious, may have played a role in public and government reaction to the 1985 bombing that took 329 lives.

Former Supreme Court judge John Major suggested Wednesday it’s “hard not to share” an impression held by some of the families of the victims:

“That is the fact that, if it had been an Air Canada plane and Anglo-Saxons, things would have been different.”

The comment came during a question-and-answer session with Bob Rae, the former premier of Ontario, whose preliminary investigation and meetings with the Air India families helped pave the way for the current inquiry.

On what basis, Major wondered, did Rae conclude in his own report last year that there was no racial bias on the part of Canadian government officials, police or intelligence officers investigating the bombing?

“Can you tell me how you came to that conclusion? Is it a gut feeling, or is there some tangible evidence.?”

Rae replied that he simply saw no sign of racism in his review of the affair. He did, however, notice certain “culturally driven” issues. For example, it often took weeks to translate wiretap surveillance tapes of the bombing suspects from Punjabi into English.

The problem he said, was that there simply weren’t enough people capable of doing the job,  just as U.S. authorities didn’t have enough Arabic-speakers to handle surveillance prior to the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

“That’s not racism . . . but it certainly leads to  ineffective surveillance,” said Rae. “It means that you can’t really understand what’s going on on a snap basis.”

Eighty per cent of the passengers on Air India Flight 182, downed by a terrorist bomb on June 23, 1985, were Canadian citizens, the vast majority of them of Indian origin or descent. Many of their relatives have long claimed the investigation would have been more thorough, and the public reaction more intense, had the victims not been members of a visible minority.

Major didn’t press the point beyond his brief remarks Wednesday, and Rae, now a federal Liberal leadership candidate, shied away from speculating about how seriously the judge may be taking the issue.

“He can speak for himself,” Rae said outside the hearing room.

In his testimony, however, he agreed with the Air India families on one fundamental point, that the enormity of the bombing was lost on many Canadians who saw it as an internal matter for the Indo-Canadian community.

“Everyone talks about 9/11 and how the world came of age on 9/11 and how we lost our innocence on 9/11,” said Rae. “We should have come of age on June 23, 1985 . . . . We should have woken up as a country.”

Rae noted that a series of well-publicized lapses in airport security procedures and baggage screening allowed the suitcase carrying the fateful bomb to get aboard Flight 182.

The downing of the plane was a preventable tragedy that “never should have been allowed to happen,” he told Major.

“It’s one of those tragic situations where everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and the consequences were simply disastrous for the people who were on board that flight.”

He also noted, as have others, that turf wars between the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service hampered the investigation of the attack. And he suggested that one of Major’s most important tasks will be to sort that out.

Government officials will no doubt insist that they have learned all the relevant lessons and will never make the same mistakes again, said Rae.

“That’s entirely understandable that they would say that, and it’s not because they don’t believe it or sincerely feel it. But it is something that needs to be held up to the light. It needs an independent view to say, `What more could we learn.’ ”

The Air India attack has long been blamed on a small group of Sikh separatists, based in British Columbia but campaigning for a homeland in the Punjab region of northern India.

Only one man was ever been convicted in court, on a charge of manslaughter for his part in building the bomb that downed the plane. Another suspect was shot dead in India in 1992, while two more were acquitted last year in a trial in Vancouver.

Major has no power to revisit past court cases or to hold anyone criminally responsible. The inquiry is concentrating on broader issues of anti-terrorist policy still relevant in the post-9/11 world.

Most of the victims’ families, nevertheless, consider it their last, best hope for justice.

© The Canadian Press

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=e1cd1246-b310-4c4f-8e7e-245aca560c64&k=95383

AIR INDIA TIMELINE 
Vancouver Sun
Published: Tuesday, September 26, 2006
1978 to May 1984: A few Sikh leaders in India and abroad start talking about separatism. They are led in England by Dr. Jagjit Singh Chouhan and in Punjab by the charismatic Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

1978: In Vancouver, suspected Air India mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar starts the militant separatist group Babbar Khalsa.

June 29, 1983: Parmar is arrested in Germany on an Interpol warrant saying he is wanted for three murders in India in 1981. He is assisted by two friends in Canada, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Surjan Singh Gill, and in July 1984 wins his release.

June 5, 1984: Indian government troops storm Amritsar's Golden Temple, galvanizing Sikh extremists who favour armed struggle to get a Sikh nation called Khalistan carved from Punjab. The attack on the holy shrine ignites anger and spurs violence in B.C.'s Sikh community.

July 1984: Parmar, fresh from a German jail cell, addresses supporters at a Calgary Sikh temple, saying Air India planes will fall from the sky in retaliation for the Golden Temple attack.

June 4, 1985: Agents of the fledgling Canadian Security Intelligence Service follow Parmar to Duncan on Vancouver Island. Accompanied by Inderjit Singh Reyat and another unidentified man dubbed Mr. X, the trio sets off explosives in the woods. Police say they were testing materials for the Air India bomb.

June 23, 1985: A bomb explodes at Japan's Narita airport in a Vancouver suitcase tagged for an Air India flight. Two baggage handlers are killed and four others wounded. Less than an hour later, Air India Flight 182 blows up off the coast of Ireland, killing all aboard.

Nov. 8, 1985: Parmar and Reyat arrested in connection with Air India. Charges against Parmar are dropped and Reyat is fined for a minor explosives charge.

May 9, 1991: Inderjit Reyat is convicted of fabricating the explosive device that killed two baggage handlers at Narita Airport. He is sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter.

Oct. 27, 2000: Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri are charged with conspiracy to murder in connection with the bombings of Air India Flight 182 and at Narita on June 23, 1985.

June 6, 2001: Reyat is charged in Air India Flight 182 bombing just days before his 10-year sentence for his role in the Narita bombing is up.

Feb. 10, 2003: Reyat pleads guilty to manslaughter and is sentenced to five years in jail.

April 28, 2003: The trial of Malik and Bagri begins in B.C. Supreme Court before Justice Ian Bruce Josephson in a packed, high-security courtroom. Dozens of reporters from around the world are joined by victims' relatives, community leaders, family members of the accused men and RCMP members who worked on the case over the years.

Dec. 3, 2004: After 19 months and 232 court days, the Crown and defence rest in Canada's longest and most complex criminal trial.

March 16, 2005: Bagri and Malik are found not guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of 331 people in two terrorist bombings that targeted Air India.

© Vancouver Sun 2006

                                         ***
Horror of Air India crash seared into memories of rescue crews

This 28 June 1985 file photo shows Irish naval authorities bringing ashore debris from an Air India Boeing 747 in Cork, Ireland, following the crash of the aircraft 23 June 1985 that killed all 329 people on board.
Photograph by : ANDRE DURAND/AFP/Getty Images   

Kim Bolan, CanWest News Service
Published: Wednesday, September 27, 2006
It was the baby from Air India Flight 182 that most bothered British merchant mariner Mark Stagg.

After hours of helping with the recovery of bodies from the bombed airliner on June 24, 1985, the infant was passed to Stagg on the deck of the freighter Laurentian Forest by a helicopter winchman.

"He is crying as he passes me the bundle,'' Stagg testified Wednesday at the Air India inquiry. "I look down into the towel, he or she is perfect and beautiful. I rested my face on the baby's cheek and it was so cold.''

He was forced to stick the dead baby in a giant plastic bag.

"Now sitting here with all of you, I cannot begin to describe the utter wrongness of putting children in plastic bags,'' Stagg said.

His shipmate Daniel Brown remembers the look of terror on an elderly Sikh man's face as he dragged his body by its long grey hair into a lifeboat.

Brown wept as he recalled thinking that the man knew what was happening to him when the jumbo jet broke apart in mid-air after a terrorist bomb exploded.

"His eyes wide open, his mouth wide open, he was screaming, his teeth were decayed. He had the look of horror in his face,'' Brown told Justice John Major, the inquiry commissioner.

"He had just one black sock. He appeared to have very little injury.''

Brown and Stagg were hopeful when they arrived at the scene aboard their cargo ship that they would find survivors. Instead they saw only death and devastation.

"At one point I had half a body in my hands. Someone shouted `Let it go. It is only half.' But I wouldn't let it go,'' Brown said.

British and Irish rescuers provided hours of graphic testimony at the inquiry, bringing most in the hearing room to tears. The men also described their personal turmoil after being thrust into the gruesome recovery task that has haunted them since that day.

Some have had break-downs. They suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome including nightmares, violent outbursts, anxiety attacks and fear of flying.

Brown said one shipmate walked off the boat that day and never returned.

He remembers seamen vomiting and crying as they helped him drag the bodies into a small open lifeboat which Brown said was identical to the ones the Titanic used.

Seanie Murphy, the captain of an Irish coast guard vessel that spent six hours racing to the wreckage site, said he later coped by not speaking of what happened that day.

"I have never spoken in depth about it,'' he said, breaking down with emotion. His vessel nearly ran out of fuel, but still recovered the bodies of a man, three women and a child.

Murphy, who lives on an island off the southwest coast of Ireland, named all the crew from his ship so they would be on the official Canadian record created by this inquiry, for which victims' families have lobbied for two decades.

He has had the chance to meet some of the relatives of those who perished in the bombing.

"It is only when I meet them that it all comes back to me. I see the suffering that they have gone through. I just hope they get some peace,'' Murphy said.

Mark Tait was a winchman aboard a Royal Airforce rescue helicopter who was lowered down to try to retrieve the dead.

"One of the bodies I recovered was a young woman, Asian, approximately 25 to 30 years, slim, long hair, well-manicured fingernails,'' said a statement from Tait read into evidence. "Her eyes were fixed and dilated and one eye was almost closed. She had no muscle tone, was completely floppy and unresponsive.''

The scene was horrendous, even for the well-trained crews that had arrived there by plane, helicopter and aboard various vessels.

"I remember saying to myself each time I was winched out 'Oh God, don't let this one be as smashed up as the others,''' said Tait, who eventually had to take a nine-month stress leave due to depression.

The inquiry's opening week of testimony has been a difficult one as relatives described the moment they got the call that the plane went down and then the difficult task of heading to Ireland to try to get a body back.

The emotion continued Wednesday as the rescuers told of their efforts and their disappointment of not being able to do more.

Just 132 of the 329 people were recovered.

Brown said the North Atlantic is considered "an unfriendly ocean the biggest graveyard in the world.''

"I wish we could have got more, I wish we could have brought them all home, but I think the ocean beat us,'' he said.

Vancouver Sun