Link to canada.com for the breaking news
What do you guys think?
Given the fact that it took the authorities two DECADES to get to the point where the case could be handed to a judge, and in all that time they found virtually no actual evidence, I’m not surprised at all.
Could someone please tell me about this? I was about 5 when it happened and don’t have the inclination to search through decades of material on it.
I’m not surprised either. The evidence seemed to consist mostly of witnesses who said the defendants had confessed to them, but the witnesses were also not remotely credible. There was enough reasonable doubt to drive a truck through.
Air India flight 182, a 747 flying from Montreal to London, UK, exploded over the Atlantic Ocean on June 22, 1985, killing all 329 people on board. Most were Canadians.
On the same day, at Tokyo-Narita airport, a bomb on a Cathay Pacific aircraft exploded on the ground, killing four ground personnel.
It was later found that AI 182 was destroyed by a bomb that had been hidden in a suitcase and checked aboard in Vancouver, making the disaster the worst mass murder in the history of Canada.
It is generally assumed that the bombings were the work of Sikh separatists looking to commit acts of terrorism against India. At the time the Indian government and the Sikh minority in India had come to many violent clashes.
I won’t go into the exact details of the investigation but it should tell you everything you need to know that
- Physical evidence was lost,
- The suspects were all under surveillance, but the cops forgot to keep the guy who delivered the bombs under surveillance on the day he delivered the bombs,
- Charges laid soon after the case had to be dropped because there was no evidence, and it took 18 years to get a trail going, and
- The one guy they had actual evidence against was allowed to plead out for a five year sentence, even though they also had convicted him for the Narita bombing.
It has not been one of the finer moments for Canadian law enforcement.
The explosion happened off the coast of Ireland, and there’s a monument on the nearby beach to the victims. So this was pretty big news here too.
Very sad, but if you can’t prove guilt you can’t prove guilt.
I don’t understand this mass murder charge. Those acts were terrorism. Yet, for some reason, we change it to a charge of mass murder. Why? As far as I heard this had to do with Sikh separatists and the politics of India in the 80’s. This wasn’t an action just to kill people but to make a political point that used murder as a means to intimidate.
We had a terrorist act out of Canada twenty years ago and we let it slide. Our police were sloppy, and our intelligence agency was lackadaisical.
In my mind it is because the murdered Canadians in question weren’t white and therefore, at the time of the incident, were not considered really worth the effort. I remember the attitudes towards the Indian community in the 80’s and it was not pretty. Friends of mine were beaten up because their skin was brown (as they put it) or because they had an accent. I even remember the nasty kafuffle over the RCMP Uniform when they adopted the turban for observant Sikh officers. It demonstrated a very nasty side to the Canadian community that always pretended that it wasn’t racist like those other people down south. The fact is that the evidence was piss poor and these two get acquitted. If they did do this they got away with it because at the time very few outside of that one community really gave a damn (IMOHO)
“Murder” is in a way a far more honest word. These were human beings that died, not political chips. It was murder, plain and simple. It was terrorism as well, but the key word is murder.
Well, we are most definitely in agreement on this point. The performance of the Canadian authorities and government here is utterly shameful, and it is quite obviously at least partially racism.
There is no doubt in my mind, none whatsoever, that if it had been an Air France flight full of people named Tremblay and Dugal, bombed by Corsicans, that our government would have moved heaven and earth to find the perpetrators. Instead we got a Keystone Cops performance by authorities who didn’t really give a shit about the funny looking people with the funny sounding names.
People are calling for an “inquiry,” which is part of the problem, really; in Canada today, we don’t solve problems, we just hold inquiries.
I remember the RCMP kerfuffle very well. What utter stupidity. I remember upon joing the army being told by a bemused NCO that the QROs (the military laws that include uniform rules) carefully state how a soldier should wear a turban, and had for decades. He couldn’t figure out what the RCMP’s problem was.
I wonder if we have a problem with increasingly substandard law enfrocement in this country. Maybe it’s just me living near Toronto, but I seem to be hearing many, many stories about incompetent law enforcement. Yet nobody wants to admit a problem may exist. When the police chief’s contract was not extended, you’d have thought the city council had declared Puppy Kicking Day.
I also note that there is no public discussion of the shameful delays we have in Canada to try accused suspects; here in Ontario we have people rotting in jail for years, sometimes five years or more, waiting for their trials.
I was shocked that people were shocked that the two accused were set free. I have not been following this closely but as far as I had heard, and Rickjay has noted, there wasn’t much to go on to begin with. It seems like this was brought to trial in order to give the illusion that Canada at least tried to prosecute someone. The families seemed to be geniunely shocked. Perhaps they were told that the case was stronger than it actually was which, if true, is really unfortunate.
Now the families are calling for an inquiry and it is starting to look like they just want to blame someone so they can put things to rest. I have never lost someone to this type of tragedy but looking for revenge is not going to make things better. At least, that’s the way things look from here.
I think it is a little more than just revenge. They rightly think that this country, their country has let them down because from the start this was looked upon as an attack on Indians and not on Canadians which it should have been.
If I remember correctly Then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent his apologies to India and said nothing to the Canadian citizens here who lost their loved ones.
This was an attack on Canadian soil against Canadians and it was treated as if it was someone elses problem…
My revenge comments were motivated by hearing the various families commenting that somehow the conviction was needed in order to lay this to rest. I don’t understand how a conviction helps this, especially if the conviction is achieved without adequate evidence.
That being said, I was 10 at the time of the incident and I don’t recall Canada’s reaction to this. Mulroney really overlooked the canadians?
I simply won’t believe this without evidence.
Sure, the investigation was riddled with incompetence. But deliberately caused, by racism? The government not care that a whole airplane filled with people was blown up?
That I can’t accept on faith.
I agree about the turban thing - that was bizzare; but didn’t the RCMP eventually accept the turban?
I’m not going to blow up an airplane to provide us with the evidence, but you have already misrepresented my argument. I did not say, or even imply, that the government DELIBERATELY caused the investigation to be screwed up, for racism or any other reason.
I DID say that the government (and the media, and a lot of Canadians, to be honest) underplayed the magnitude of the tragedy basically because the Canadians involved were not white. I am reminded of the 1988 Ben Johnson scandal, when Johnson was Canadian before he was caught cheating and “Jamaican-Canadian” after. Absent another plane being blown up I can’t prove otherwise, but I gotta tell you I’m 100% convinced of it. If an air Canada flight full of white people was blown up by terrorists today, do you not think it would be the Canadian news story of the decade?
I dunno; maybe my phrasing wasn’t the best, but unless I am misunderstanding completely, you certainly imply some sort of cause and effect relationship here:
I think that the difference between “deliberately caused incompetence as a result of racism” and “a shameful performance … obviously at least partly racism” is a matter of semantics.
Will you agree that you are alleging that the government botched the investigation, and BUT FOR racism would not have botched it?
I dunno about “underplayed the magnitude of the tragedy”; seems to me it was pretty big news. But I think that is besides the point. Whether it was big news or not is a different issue from whether the investigation was screwed up or not.
I’m not arguing that Canadians don’t have their share of racism. I am just arguing that there is no evidence that this latent racism, of whatever magnitude, had any effect on the screw-up of the investigation of the Air India disaster.
Whether or not Mounties fussed over turbans, or Canadian newspapers emphasised Ben Johnson’s Jamacan origins when he was a fallen hero (neither of which, BTW, is really irrefutable evidence of racism in particular) is one thing.
Whether or not the government flubbed an investigation because it “didn’t give a shit” about Canadians because of their origin is quite another, and much more serious, matter.
Well think about it this way. When studying terrorist acts against Canadians in Canada the only thing in text books will be the FLQ crisis. The fact is that Air India was Canadas 9/11 but it is not looked upon that way because at the time we did not see these people as Canadians. Yes there was coverage but if you compare the reaction to that compared to Lockerbie or the Swiss Air flight in our more recent history it seems there is a vast difference in Canadian reaction.
No, there was no deliberate incompetence but at the same time there was no real focused investigation. It was a weak reaction to a major crime against Canadian citizens.
Think about it this way would it have taken 20 years to come up with a judgement if two bombs were palced on Air Canada jets resulting in the loss of one. and the death of two (say) German Baggage handlers on a second? What would the response to the governemnt be if the people allegedly responsible were not convicted due to a piss poor investigation by the RCMP and CSIS? Why is there a such a difference in the attitude?
I dunno - seems to me to be faulty reasoning.
Admittedly, the investigation was incompetent. It seems to me that you are trying to say that this incompetence was not “deliberate”, but at the same time, somehow caused by racism.
I simply won’t believe that without actual evidence. Saying that the average Canadian felt differently about Indians 20 years ago, that they weren’t “real Canadians” or whatever, isn’t evidence. It is the shoddiest sort of generalization.
And yes, I do think it is possible for the government and police to botch an investigation, and the courts to take 20 years to come up with a judgment, if the victims happen to be on an Air Canada jet, or be German as opposed to Japanese baggage handlers. That is a matter of lack of reliable evidence and government dithering over the same, hardly a result of “racism”.
And I don’t know what response you are looking for, but the front page of the Globe the other day was pretty moving - they printed the names of all the victims, and there was no lack of outrage about the crappy investigation. It seemed quite a response to me, and no less than I would expect for an Air Canada jet or whatever.
I think that pointing the racism finger is not a good thing to do, if it is just based on general principles; better to save the outrage for a case where there is some actual evidence that the outrage is warranted. It distorts thinking, and takes the focus of the true causes of things - which I suspect strongly in this case was “incompetence among the agencies involved”.
Ouch. That’s rough. I guess I couldn’t convict either. To the jury it probably sounded like the cops grabbed a couple of guys off the street.
No jury. The trial was decided by a judge.
For anyone who doesn’t know, in Canada, the defendant in a criminal trial has the right to choose to be tried by either a judge or a jury.