Open letter to the federal minister of public safety regarding the necessity to examine the role of a CSIS informer in the bombing against the Air India Flight 182 in which 329 peoples died more than twenty years ago.

To the Honorable Stockwell Day,
Minister of Public Safety
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

Montreal, March 21 2006

WHY THE INQUIRY INTO AIR INDIA MUST CLARIFY THE ROLE OF CSIS INFORMER SURJAN SINGH GILL

Subject: public inquiry on Air India

Attention Mr. Minister :

Your party decided to honor the electoral promise engagement of holding a public inquiry into the Air India case. Your colleague, Justice Minister Vic Toews, gave you the task of fixing the framework and timeline of the public inquiry into this dramatic event that is now nearly twenty-one years old.

Despite the un-precedent scope of this tragedy, I can unfortunately testify, to the fact that today in Montreal, many fellow citizens are still very much unaware of this horrible event. People seem to have forgotten that the Air India Flight 182 took off from the Mirabel airport (in the Montreal area) before exploding over the Atlantic Ocean off the shores of Ireland. There were 329 people on board. This includes 84 children younger than twelve years old. No one survived. All of this took place on June 23, 1985.

It was, at the time, the most murderous attack throughout the international history of civilian aviation during times of peace. Yet it took more than fifteen years before criminal charges were laid even though the identity of the group responsible for the attack was known to the authorities for quite some time. It was Babbar Khalsa, a Sikh fundamentalist group that was fighting for the creation of a Khalistan Republic, who were added to the terrorist entity’s list by the Canadian Liberal government in 2003.

Inderjit Singh Reyat, the man who built the bombs that exploded on June 23 1985, was a member of Babbar Khalsa. He has been in prison since 1988. In May 1991, Mr. Reyat was found guilty of double manslaughter in connection to a second bomb which went off at the Narita airport, in Japan, and which had been prepared for another Air India plane. This attack took place less than an hour before the explosion of the Air India Flight 182, on the other side of the world.

In February 2003, Mr. Reyat pleaded guilty to 329 counts of manslaughter. He was sentenced to five years of prison, in exchange of his cooperation with the prosecution during the Air India mega-trial against two defendants, Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik. We know today that the prosecution didn’t get a good deal, since perjury charges were recently brought against Mr. Reyat for lying twenty-seven times during his testimony at the mega-trial. In other words, the Crown got fooled by the maker of the most deadly bomb ever made in Canadian history.

We know for quite a long time that Babbar Khalsa was under surveillance by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in the weeks preceding the attack. Their leader, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was both under physical and electronic surveillance, as the authorities dreaded counter actions in response to the massacre that occurred at the Golden Temple in India one year earlier. And all this didn’t prevent the loss of 329 human lives.

And yet this was to be only the top layer of troubling surprises to unfold.

When the Air India mega-trial started up in 2003, the British Colombia Superior Court lifted the publishing ban on thousands of pages of RCMP documents. Following this disclosure, the Globe and Mail published in June 2003, a series of news articles revealing, for the first time, the possible involvement of a CSIS informant in the group responsible for the deadly attack. At that time, your colleagues from the now defunct Canadian Alliance stood in the House to ask the Liberal government to implement a royal commission of inquiry.

The fact that Babbar Khalsa was infiltrated by a mole shouldn’t be a subject of debate now. Why? Because a Crown prosecutor by the name of Diane Wiedemann, has already identified Surjan Singh Gill as an informer during a hearing at the British Columbia Superior Court, on June 20th 2003, as reported in a news article by the Canadian Press.
(CANADIAN PRESS, “Search warrants in Air India case show RCMP ready to charge 'informant'