Ripudaman Singh Malik, suspect in a terrorist bombing that killed 329 people aboard an Air India flight in 1985 was shot dead in Canada today (July 15). Malik along with co-defendant Ajaib Singh Bagri was found not guilty in March 2005 of murder and conspiracy in a pair of Air India bombings that killed 331 people on June 23, 1985. The attack on Air India Flight 182, which exploded over the Atlantic Ocean in 1985, is one of history’s deadliest bombings of a commercial airliner. Police have alleged it was plotted by Sikh extremists living in Canada as revenge on India for its storming of Sikhism’s Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984.
Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, a sawmill worker in Kamloops, British Columbia, were charged in 2000 with bombing Flight 182. They were also charged with killing two baggage handlers who died when a suitcase bomb, alleged by police as designed to destroy another Air India jet over the Pacific Ocean, exploded in Japan’s Narita airport.
In Malik’s trial, British Columbia Supreme Court heard that a suitcase bomb was loaded onto a plane at Vancouver’s airport and then transferred in Toronto to Air India Flight 182. The aircraft crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland, killing 329 passengers and crew.
About an hour later, a bomb destined for another Air India plane exploded prematurely at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, where two baggage handlers died.
Deepak Khandelwal of Oakville, Ontario, said the shooting “just brings back all the horrible memories we’d had to go through for the last 37 years.” He was 17 when his sisters, 21-year-old Chandra and 19-year-old Manju, were killed on Flight 182.
With agencies inputs
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