The mysterious mr Singh

It was Saturday, June 22, 1985, at 13:30 in the afternoon in the city of Vancouver in Canada. The phone rang at the Air India ticket office.
"Hello. It is "Manjit Singh". I would like to confirm that my bookings on Air India Flight 181/182”.
The friendly employee at the office informed him that he was still on the waiting list and offered him a number of alternatives, which he declined.
At 3:50 p.m., 2 ½ hours later, Manjit Singh, who had purchased tickets under the name M. Singh, checked into a busy 30-person line for Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 60 from Vancouver to Montreal with a stopover in Toronto. He asked employee Jeannie Adams to check in his dark brown, hard Samsonite suitcase and have it transferred to Flight 182 to India. She initially refused his request to check the luggage on another flight as his seats from Toronto to Montreal and Montreal to Bombay were unconfirmed. When he started to leave, she relented and agreed to accept the suitcase, but told him to check in again with Air India in Toronto. It was to be a decision that Jeannie Adams bitterly regretted. 15 hours later, Air India Flight 182, carrying M. Singh's brown suitcase containing a powerful bomb, crashed into the sea, killing all 307 passengers and 22 crew members. A tragedy which was to become the worst terrorist attack on an aircraft before 9/11.

Sources used in this episode:
https://theprint.in/past-forward/air-india-ki-flight-mat-lo-how-canadian-neglect-led-up-to-kanishka-bombing-38-yrs-ago/1638383/ http://news.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/jun/29/slide-show-1-children-shouldnt-die-in-front-of-their-parents.htm#3 https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=82216&page=1
https://www.indiatoday.in/fyi/story/1984-operation-blue-star-amritsar-1251681-2018-06-06
https://www.ctvnews.ca/man-told-blatant-lies-at-air-india-trial-court-1.553030
https://time.com/4672937/inderjit-singh-reyat-air-india-bombing-canada-freed/
https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/06/23/air-india-182-anniversary-poll/

Music used in this episode
Dramatic Suspense: https://pixabay.com/music/suspense-dramatic-suspense-116798/ by https://pixabay.com/users/ashot-danielyan-composer-27049680/
Anuch – Our champion - Music from #Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/anuch/our-champion
Lotus Morning No Gongs No Drums - P5 by AbbasPremjee: https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-music/item/58734641-lotus-morning-no-gongs-no-drums
Himalayas by SergeQuadrado: https://pixabay.com/music/world-himalayas-13503/
India -Olistik Sound Project by Patrizio Yoga: https://pixabay.com/music/meditationspiritual-india-olistik-sound-project-patrizio-yoga-13757/
Bollywood Sad Bgm by KamaleshSiddu: https://pixabay.com/music/main-title-bollywood-sad-bgm-14283/

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Transcript

The mysterious Mr Singh
It was Saturday, June 22, 1985, at 13:30 in the afternoon in the city of Vancouver in Canada. The phone rang at the Air India ticket office.
"Hello. It is "Manjit Singh". I would like to confirm that my bookings on Air India Flight 181/182”.
The friendly employee at the office informed him that he was still on the waiting list and offered him a number of alternatives, which he declined.
At 3:50 p.m., 2 ½ hours later, Manjit Singh, who had purchased tickets under the name M. Singh, checked into a busy 30-person line for Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 60 from Vancouver to Montreal with a stopover in Toronto. He asked employee Jeannie Adams to check in his dark brown, hard Samsonite suitcase and have it transferred to Flight 182 to India. She initially refused his request to check the luggage on another flight as his seats from Toronto to Montreal and Montreal to Bombay were unconfirmed. He insisted, but Jeannie Adams rebuffed him, telling him:
" Your ticket doesn't read that you're confirmed and we're not supposed to check your baggage through."
Manjit Singh gave her a somewhat strange answer:
"Wait, I'll get my brother for you."
When he started to leave, she relented and agreed to accept the suitcase, but told him to check in again with Air India in Toronto. It was to be a decision that Jeannie Adams bitterly regretted. 15 hours later, Air India Flight 182, carrying M. Singh's brown suitcase containing a powerful bomb, crashed into the sea, killing all 307 passengers and 22 crew members. A tragedy which was to become the worst terrorist attack on an aircraft before 9/11.

Air India 182, which had taken off from Montreal at 00:15, was headed for London's Heathrow Airport before making another stopover in Delhi, India, before its final destination in India's second city, Bombay. It is the one we know today as Mumbai. Many of the passengers were of Indian origin and were returning home to visit family and friends. At At 7.09 in the morning, the pilot of Air India 182 made the mandatory check-in at the Irish airport Shannon Airport. Five minutes later at 7.14 the plane disappeared from air traffic controllers' radar when the bomb in M. Singh's brown Samsonite suitcase went off. Some of the wreckage was scattered over the coast of the Cork region in southern Ireland, while the rest disappeared into the North Sea. Only 132 of the 329 people were found, while the rest disappeared into the sea. Examination of the people found indicated that several had not been in the plane when it hit the water because they showed signs of oxygen deprivation or explosive decompression. In other words, that the plane had broken up at an altitude where there is too little oxygen for people to survive, or that they simply died from pressure damage from the explosion.

Shortly after Air India 182 crashed on Sunday morning, 12-year-old Susheel Gupta, who was the son of Indian immigrants, was woken up by his father. He was actually supposed to be with his mother, Ramwati, on holiday to India, but his father had not managed to buy more than a plane ticket, so he stayed with his father and his brother at their house in Toronto, Canada. Their father woke his two sons with the terrible news that the plane their mother was flying on had been reported missing. Susheel Gupta recalls being "very angry" and unable to understand "why anyone would kill so many innocent people?"
“Any glorification of hate that promotes violence makes me sad. It is abhorrent,”
said Susheel Gupta, who today heads the Ottawa-based Air India Victims' Families Association, many years later.
" I still meet people today who were somehow connected with the Air India bombing — my kindergarten daughter’s teacher was a schoolmate of a victim. It is surprising how widely the bombing affected Canadians "

Another family affected by the tragedy was the Lata Padas. Two weeks before the tragedy, Lata Pada, who lived in the city of Ontario in Canada, had traveled to India to prepare for a Bharatnatyam performance, which is a classical Indian dance. Her husband and two daughters would later join her. Unfortunately, they boarded Air India 182. Three decades later, she stated:
"Every year, the anniversary of the Air India Kanishka bombing is very emotionally draining. On a personal level, the grieving continues as it is so much about the void in one's life which can never be filled as well as the unrealised potential of the future "
Had her daughters been alive today, they would have been in their 40s, possibly married, and she might have had grandchildren.”
It was a human tragedy of monstrous proportions. The dead were 268 Canadians, 27 British, 22 Indians and 12 people of unknown nationality. Canadians of Indian descent made up the majority of passengers, were Hindu and lived in southern Ontario. But there were also approx. 35 Sikhs from Montreal and the surrounding area. Between 82 and 86 passengers were children, including six infants, and in 29 of the families all members were present on the plane.

As the initial shocks of the disaster subsided a bit, speculation began as to who could have carried out such a horrific attack on so many innocent people. But it wasn't many hours before a particular group of Canadian society became the focus of the investigation. This attack did not happen out of the blue. Still, it was a threat of retaliatory attacks, which so-called Sikh separatists had threatened to commit many times in the years before against their Hindu co-religionists. Observations, wiretapping, searches, and arrests of people believed to have participated ultimately led the investigation to point to this group of at least two Sikh terrorist groups with members in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. But who were these people, and what led to such intense hatred that they felt justified in unleashing it on innocent children and adults?

Let's take a trip to the other side of the world, more precisely to India's northeastern state. Here, Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak in the late 15th century and has since grown into the fifth-largest organized religion in the world. Sikhism originates from Hinduism and shares several basic features, such as karma and rebirth. Followers of Sikhism are called Sikhs, and they number approx. 25-30 million people. Most of them, around 24 million, live in Punjab in India, where they constitute a considerable population group four times as large as the Danish population. Sikhs live in societies worldwide peacefully and are integrated into the population. Still, perhaps you know the men wearing the characteristic turban, which hides their long hair. According to their religion, cutting and trimming hair growth for both men and women is forbidden, and the most spiritually dedicated often also have long beards. Hindus make up 80% of the population in India, but in Punjab in particular, the Sikhs are actually the majority, with barely 60%. As seen in many other major monotheistic religions, there have also been clashes between the Hindus and the Sikhs throughout time. In the 1970s, the Punjabi Sikhs sought greater independence, which up through the 1980s, led to mass arrests, repression and torture by the Indian authorities.

During the 1970s, many Sikhs emigrated to Western Canada for better economic opportunities. By the 1980s, the area around Vancouver in British Columbia had become the most significant centre of the Sikh population outside of India. One of these immigrants was the Sikh preacher Talwinder Singh Talwinder Parmar, who had founded the terrorist group Babbar Khalsa on 13 April 1978. He was born in 1944 in the Punjabi village of Panchata and emigrated to Canada in 1970, although he still had extended stays in India. The organization aimed to create an ethnoreligious and independent state called Khalistan in today's Punjabi state in India. In 1981, he was accused by Indian authorities of killing a policeman in a Punjabi village, forcing him to flee back to Canada. Here he continued his work for an independent state.
Only in the 1980s did several Sikh militant groups begin to occupy The Golden Temple, the holiest building in Sikhism. They built bunkers and observation posts in and around the temple and arranged military training for their soldiers. The escalation of the military presence in 1984 prompted the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to order an operation against the militias called Operation Blue Star. Almost 500 civilians and 83 Indian soldiers are believed to have been killed during the crossfire. In retaliation for Blue Star and other abuses, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguard in 1984, leading to massacres by Hindus against civilian Sikhs. Up to 20,000 Sikhs were burned alive or otherwise killed, their property attacked, and at least 50,000 people were internally displaced.

Talwinder Parmar vowed to avenge the Indian state's abuse of the Sikhs. One day in 1984, a year before the attack on Air India, he visited Inderjit Singh Reyat, a car mechanic and electrician in Duncan in the Canadian state of British Columbia. Inderjit was born on 11 March 1952 in India, but he moved with his family to Britain in 1965 and Canada in 1974. Parmar Reyat on constructing a bomb.
Reyat solicited explosives for up to several people in the local community, claiming he would remove tree stumps on his property. He also discussed explosives with a colleague, expressing anger at the Indian government, particularly Indira Gandhi.
In April 1985, Inderjit Reyat approached a Canadian with an understanding of explosives and asked how much explosive was required to blow up a tree stump. He was willing to pay three times what it usually costs and finally recognized that it was not about stumps but about

"trouble in his old country and that he needed explosives to help his countrymen.".
On 8 May 1985, Reyat purchased a digital car clock designed for a 12-volt automotive electrical system with a 24-hour alarm to activate a buzzer. He also bought a relay that could trigger the detonator circuit for a blasting cap, which would provide the initial shock necessary to detonate larger explosives such as dynamite. Together, all these parts could be used to construct a time bomb. About a week later, he tried to blow up the dynamite in the woods around his hometown of Duncan. He told friends and confessed that he wanted to blow up tree stumps.
At the same time, Talwinder Parmar travelled around Canada with the powerful and radical preacher, Ajaib Singh Bagri, to incite the Sikhs living there to raise money for the fight against the Indian government. He was critical of Mahatma Gandhi, considered the father of the Indian nation, and his use of non-violent methods in the Indian independence struggle against the British in the first part of the 20th century. At the founding convention of the World Sikh Organization (WSO) held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Ajaib Bagri gave a speech to about 4,000 people in which he said, among other things. 
"we will not rest until we have killed 50,000 Hindus".
On 9 June 1985, an authority informant said that Talwinder Parmar and Ajaib Bagri had visited the Malton Sikh Temple and warned the worshipers that "it would be unsafe" to fly with Air India. A leader of the International Sikh Youth Federation complained that no Indian consuls or ambassadors had yet been killed, but the response to him was: 
"You will see. Something will be done in two weeks".

We are now on the day that M. Singh had checked the brown suitcase with explosives into the terminal in Montreal, where it was to go on Air India Flight 182. But we immediately step out of history and fly 10,000 kilometres east to the Japanese capital Tokyo. In fact, more precisely, New Tokyo International Airport (today known as Narita international airport), where it was about twenty minutes past eight in the evening. Mr L. Singh checked a piece of luggage onto Air India Flight 301 to Bangkok with 177 passengers and crew members. But the suitcase never made it that far, because an hour before departure it exploded on the luggage belt at Tokyo's airport. 177 people saved their lives, but at the cost of two Japanese baggage handlers killed in the explosion.
Of course, it was not something anyone knew then, but there was a direct connection between this bomb and the bomb on Air India Flight 182. The plane in Tokyo was supposed to take off at the same time as Air India Flight 182, but the terrorists had committed an elementary error. They had forgotten to consider that June was summertime in Montreal, and thus an additional hour difference between the two countries and flight departures.
Despite the tragedy of the two baggage handlers killed, the failed attack on the plane in Japan was to end up helping to solve the bomb on Air India Flight 182. It was quickly established that there were several similarities between the two bombs. The tickets for both flights were bought by the same person, and the planes flew with suitcases without the passenger who checked them in. When the remains of the bomb in Tokyo were examined, it was also found to have been stored in a Sanyo tuner with a serial number from a model sold only in British Columbia.

Canadian police had no fewer than 135 officers check every store that might have sold Sanyo tuners. This led to the discovery of a recent sale to mechanic Inderjit Singh Reyat in his hometown of Duncan, British Columbia. The Canadian police contacted the intelligence service and learned they were investigating the Sikh activists. CSIS already had wiretaps, had observed Reyat and Talwinder Parmar at the test detonation in the woods near Duncan and had recovered detonating caps and a paper base wrapper from a detonating cap. A search revealed the receipt for a Sanyo Tuner model FMT-611K with an invoice bearing his name and phone number and the sale of other bomb components. It was not until January 1986 that Canadian investigators concluded that a bomb explosion in the forward cargo hold had caused the airliner to crash.
And with this discovery, the investigators could slowly but surely unravel a network of several men we have met earlier in history. Besides Inderjit Reyat, the leads also led to hate preacher Ajaib Bagri, Talwinder Parmar, who had ordered the attack, and several other suspects. Initially, the authorities lacked evidence to link Inderjit Reyat directly to the bombings of the planes. Instead, they charged him with possession of explosive substances and an illegal firearm. On 29 April 1986, nine months after the terrorist attacks, Reyat pleaded guilty and was fined $2,000. Three months later, he moved to Coventry in England, where he worked at a Jaguar factory for the following two years.
But neither the Canadian nor the Japanese authorities were finished investigating the terrorist attack. Ultimately, experts were able to match bomb components with items that Reyat had in his possession or had purchased. It eventually amounted to two counts of manslaughter and five explosives-related charges. After protracted extradition negotiations with Britain, Inderjit Reyat on 13 December 1989, 4½ years after the heinous act, Reyat was flown to Vancouver, where his trial began nine months later. On 10 May 1991, he was convicted of two counts of manslaughter and four counts of possession of explosives in connection with the Narita Airport bombing. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
But there were still more heads to be rolled, or at least an attempt had to be made. Fifteen years after the bombing, on 27 October 2000, Canadian police arrested Ajaib Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik, a Sikh businessman and activist residing in Canada. They were charged with 329 counts of premeditated murder of people on board Air India Flight 182 and conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder of passengers and crew on the plane at Japan's New Tokyo International Airport. On 6 June 2001, the RCMP arrested Reyat, who had almost served his previous 10-year sentence, and charged him with murder, attempted murder and conspiracy in the Air India bombing. On 10 February 2003, Reyat pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter for helping to make a bomb. He was sentenced to five years in prison. The court argued that Reyat was guilty of helping to make the bomb but that he lacked any knowledge of how it would be used and did not intend to kill.
The trial of Malik and Bagri continued between April 2003 and December 2004 in Courtroom 20 and became popularly known as the "Air India Courtroom". Five years after the arrest and 20 years after the terrorist act, on 16 March 2005, Judge Ian Josephson found the two accused not guilty of all charges because the evidence was insufficient:
" I began by describing the horrible nature of these cruel acts of terrorism, acts which cry out for justice. Justice is not achieved, however, if persons are convicted on anything less than the requisite standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt ... The evidence has fallen markedly short of that standard."
In September 2010, jurors were told that Reyat had lied 19 times under oath, and he was given a prison sentence for the third time, this time for 9 years. The judge noted that Reyat.
" behaved nothing like a remorseful man unwittingly implicated in a mass murder ", and that.
“In the witness box, Mr. Reyat behaved like a man still committed to a cause which treated hundreds of men, women and children as expendable."
On 28 January 2016, Inderjit Singh Reyat was released on parole under particular conditions. He must not engage in politics, contact extremists or victims' families. He must also receive treatment for several mental illnesses.

It was heartbreaking for the relatives of the victims of the attacks that Inderjit Reyat was ultimately the only one to be convicted. In July 2022, Ripudaman Malik was killed by two criminals known to the police. At the time of this section, no verdict has been reached, and the motive is unknown. Talwinder Parmar, believed to have ordered Reyat to make the bomb, returned to India shortly after the terror attack and was killed in a firefight with Indian police in Punjab in 1992.
But it wasn't just that the terrorists were never held accountable for their heinous deeds that were heartbreaking. During the investigation, it emerged that there had been many opportunities to prevent both attacks. The Canadian government had been warned by Indian intelligence about the possibility of terrorist bombs aboard Air India flights in Canada, and over two weeks before the crash, Canadian intelligence reported to the Canadian police that the potential threat to Air India, as well as Indian targets in Canada, was high. There had also been an attempted attack the previous year in 1984, and 3 months before the successful attack, on 5 March 1985, the Canadian intelligence service, CSIS, obtained a court order to monitor Talwinder Parmar for a year ahead. During the interception of nine phone calls between Reyat and Talwinder Parmar's residence in Vancouver, the Canadian authorities even suspected that Reyat did not have clean flour in the bag and added him to the list of people being monitored for terrorist activities. There were also several suspicious actions by the authorities after the attacks, which indicated that they were trying to wash their hands. For example, the Canadian police deleted 156 of the 210 interviews they had recorded of wiretaps of the suspects and other informants. These tapes continued to be deleted even after the terrorists became the prime suspects in the bombing. The police claimed that they did not contain relevant information, but in a memo from the intelligence service, it was stated that
"There is a strong likelihood that if CSIS had saved the tapes between March and August 1985, a successful prosecution of at least some of the actors in both bombings could have been made."
And a policeman anonymously told the Globe and Mail newspaper in January 2000 that he felt compelled to destroy the tapes (which were in his custody) because he was morally obligated to do everything in his power to protect the safety of its sources.
An official report commissioned by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006 was published in 2010 and concluded in 4,000 pages that a "long series of failures" by the ministries, the RCMP and CSIS allowed the terrorist attack to occur. Stephen Harper stated on the 25th anniversary of the disaster that he would "acknowledge the catastrophic failure of intelligence, police and aviation security that led to the bombing and the prosecutorial failures that followed and issue an apology on behalf of Canada's sitting cabinet."
Apart from today's story being another example of how nationalist and separatist issues, in many cases, lead to terror, it once again underlines the similarities and differences in terrorists' motives. As in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine, belonging and power are the strongest driving forces behind terror. The purpose is clear, and a small group of people can imagine that they are acting based on the majority's wishes. The target is also clearly defined as representing the enemy and a necessary sacrifice in the battle. Even if neither is often the case.
Many of the things that happened then would probably not have happened today. Even the most minor airports often have extensive security measures such as rules for checking in luggage, scanning luggage and what passengers are allowed to carry, and procedures followed down to the last detail. Terrorist attacks today are also often solved based on investigations into digital media such as mobile phones and computers, and, not least, in many Western countries, there is camera surveillance in public places. Still, it is interesting that this terrorist attack was the deadliest attack on an aircraft in history before 9/11. And 9/11 was just committed on and with several planes.

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This episode was written, produced and narrated by me, Natasja Engholm, while Niels Peter Nielsen voiced the men in the story. Also, thank you to consultant and journalist Lars Hvidberg, who contributed with sparring and wise thoughts. You will find the episode's sources in the show notes where you listen to your podcast. I would also greatly appreciate it if you would give the podcast a positive review and tell friends and family who might be interested in listening along.
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