by Ann Williams
On June 23, Air India Flight 182 had set off from Montréal-Mirabel Airport in Canada and was flying towards Heathrow Airport, London, when a bomb exploded on board. It was 7.15 a.m. and the aeroplane was nearing its destination, flying over Ireland. Air traffic controllers at Shannon airport later reported that a crackling sound had been heard on their radio at the time of the explosion.
The plane landed in deep water out at sea near County Cork, and everyone who was on it perished. As the emergency services began the dismal task of sifting through the wreckage, a picture of what had happened began to emerge. Piecing together the evidence, investigators found that a bomb had been placed in the cargo towards the front of the plane, which had caused rapid decompression, so that the plane broke up while it was flying along. Amazingly, some of the passengers had survived the break-up of the aircraft, only to drown once they fell into the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean, almost 325 km (200 miles) offshore.
This was a tragedy on a grand scale, and the Canadian government duly set about bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice. It was thought that the bombing was the work of a Sikh separatist group called the Babbar Khalsa, who wanted to create a state for Sikhs in the Punjab. They called this state ‘Khalistan’, meaning ‘Land of the Pure’. Most of the members of this organization lived outside India, in Canada and Britain, and were suspected of mounting numerous terror attacks during the 1970s and 80s. Indeed, shortly before the bombing of Air India Flight 182, a bomb had exploded in Narita Airport, Japan, killing two baggage handlers. The bomb was in a suitcase destined for Air India Flight 310 bound for Bangkok. Thankfully for the 177 crew members and passengers on board that flight, the bomb detonated before it reached the aeroplane.
DOUBLE DEALING
As the investigation ground on, it became clear that this was going to be a long-winded enquiry. This was partly because of the complex nature of the evidence and the extreme bureaucracy of the legal system; but there were also those who believed that some double dealing between the Canadian authorities and the terrorists was going on behind the scenes.
Initially, four men were suspected of involvement in the bombings: Talwinder Singh Parmar, Inderjit Singh Reyat, Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik. Parmar was the prime suspect, as Canadian leader of the Babbar Khalsa sect. He had grown up in Punjab, India and had emigrated to Canada in 1970, living in Burnaby, B.C., with his family. A devout Sikh, he joined the Babbar Khalsa sect and became committed to the establishment of a Sikh homeland in his native Punjab. Like others in the sect, he believed that Khalistan, as the homeland was to be called, must be established by violent overthrow of the status quo in India.
Two years before the Air India bombing, Parmar had been arrested in Germany, suspected of murdering two policemen while he was in India. He spent nearly a year in prison before being released and returning to Canada. The Indian authorities requested that he be extradited to face trial in India, but they were turned down – with tragic consequences, as it turned out.
Because of his terrorist links, Parmar was under constant surveillance from the Canadian police. Not long before the Air India bombing, they had followed Parmar and an associate, Inderjit Singh Reyat, on a trip into woods on Vancouver Island, where the pair were thought to be testing an explosive of some kind. Although a loud bang was heard, when the police later searched the area, they found nothing to incriminate the pair. They then raided Parmar and Reyat’s homes and arrested them, charging them with possession of weapons and explosives, and with conspiracy. However, the charges were later dropped due to lack of evidence.
THE BOMB MAKER
Next on the list of suspects was Inderjit Reyat, who had grown up in India and emigrated, this time to England. Interestingly, it was not until his move to England, aged 13, that he became a practising Sikh, joining Akhand Kirtani, a religious devotional group. He trained as a mechanic and married before moving to Canada, where he lived and worked in Duncan, B.C. On the face of it, he seemed a model citizen, working hard, attending the local Sikh temple regularly, and living quietly with his family.
However, the security services had their eye on him as an associate of Parmar and suspected him of harbouring weapons. In 1985, he was arrested and fined for his activities. Afterwards, he moved back to England with his family – out of harm’s way, as he hoped. But the British police were keeping a close watch on him too. In 1988, he was arrested by British police on charges of manufacturing the bomb that had exploded at Narita Airport in Japan. He was then extradited to Canada to face his trial. Two years later, after a trial lasting eight months, he was convicted of the crime and received a ten-year prison sentence.
Reyat was also suspected of involvement with the Air India Flight 182 bombing and was charged accordingly. At his trial, he pleaded guilty, and he was charged with manslaughter rather than murder. He was convicted but only received a five-year sentence. This caused a great deal of controversy in Canada at the time, and outraged the family and friends of the victims. Rumour had it that the murder charges were dropped because he had struck a deal with the prosecution whereby he had agreed to give evidence against two co-conspirators, Bagri and Malik. The press and public were further outraged when Reyat took the witness box and claimed that he could remember nothing about the two men charged with the attack.
THE PREACHER AND THE MILLIONAIRE
So far, the leader of a known terrorist group (Parmar) and a bomb maker (Reyat) had, quite literally, got away with murder. But there was worse to come. Two other suspects, Ajaib Singh Bagri, a militant Sikh who had publicly called for the death of 50,000 Hindus, and Ripudaman Singh Malik, who was thought to have bankrolled the operation, were both acquitted, after facing eight counts each of first-degree murder.
Like Parmar and Reyat, Bagri was an immigrant to Canada and was a devout Sikh, well-known as a speaker among the local religious community where he lived, in Kamloops, B.C. He worked as a forklift truck driver in a sawmill by day, but much of his spare time was devoted to his work as a Sikh preacher. At a packed political rally in Madison Square Garden, New York, he made a rabble-rousing speech in which he vowed to kill 50,000 Hindus. This was in response to the notorious attack on the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar by Indian troops in 1984. Because of his violent rhetoric, he was immediately suspected of being behind the bombing of Air India Flight 182, but he did not face trial until many years later.
The other suspect, Ripudaman Singh Malik, was also a Canadian immigrant, where he had forged a successful career as a businessman, importing Indian clothing. By the time of the bombing, he was a multi-millionaire, but he was also a devout Sikh and devoted much of his income to good works within the Sikh community, including setting up a bank, a school and various charities.
CONTINUING SCANDAL
Unbelievably, despite the fact that each of these men was charged with first-degree murder eight times over, the court did not manage to gain a single conviction for them, despite many years of costly court proceedings. Thus today, the perpetrators of one of the major terror attacks of our time have, for the most part, gone unpunished – a scandal that, to this day, continues to haunt Canada’s political leaders. In May 2006, a public enquiry was set up to find out how such a situation could have occurred; but the architects of the investigation have left an ‘open time frame’ for the questions to be answered.
Egypt Air Flight 648
Over the years, I have had to adapt to the effects of being shot in the head and the resulting brain injury, which includes impaired vision and a loss of short-term memory.
survivor, Jackie Pflug
The hijacking of Egypt Air Flight 648, and the commando raid that ended it, caused the deaths of 58 passengers out of a total of 90 on the aeroplane. The high death toll of this horrible attack, which took place in 1985, has given it a place in history as one of the most tragic incidents of its kind: not only because the hijackers were so brutal, shooting passengers in cold blood at point-blank range, but also because
the authorities handled the situation so badly, leading to further deaths, which many felt could have been avoided.
ARMED TERRORISTS
On the evening of November 23, 1985, passengers waited at Athens airport to board their flight to Cairo. Security was high, as only a few months before there had been a major hijacking incident on a flight out of the airport to Rome, in which gunmen had commandeered a plane for days, and one passenger had lost his life (TWA flight 847, see page 284). Athens security services were apparently checking baggage on all outgoing flights thoroughly (later, they insisted that they had conducted five checks on the flight to Cairo). Nevertheless, three Palestinian terrorists somehow managed to escape detection, even though they were heavily armed with hand grenades and pistols. How this happened was never satisfactorily explained by officials at Athens airport.
Entirely unaware of the terrifying ordeal awaiting them, the passengers boarded the Boeing 737 for their flight to Cairo. The crew, led by pilot Hani Galal, prepared for take off, and Egypt Air Flight 648 soared into the air at 9.00 p.m. All went well until ten minutes into the flight, when the three terrorists suddenly leapt up, brandishing their weapons and announcing themselves as ‘The Egypt Revolution’. In a bizarre parody of official bureaucracy, they began their reign of terror on the aeroplane by checking all the passengers’ passports. Naturally enough, the passengers complied with the gunmens’ wishes, realizing that they were in mortal danger.
SHOOT-OUT IN THE AIR
There was one passenger, however, who chose to resist. He was an armed undercover police officer, or ‘sky marshal’. He took out a gun and shot at the hijackers, managing to kill one of them. However, even though one of the gunmen was dead, the situation was now worse, in several ways: the other two hijackers, not surprisingly, became even more aggressive; other passengers were caught in the crossfire and seriously wounded; and, most frightening of all, one of the bullets made a hole in the aeroplane’s fuselage. This caused major decompression in the aeroplane, and the pilot had to fly as low as possible to avoid disaster.
The two remaining gunmen now ordered the terrified crew to fly to Libya, but there was not enough fuel to complete such a long flight, so they decided that Malta was a better destination. However, they were wrong, as it turned out; when they came into airspace over Malta, the officials at Luqa Airport refused to allow the aeroplane to land. The pilot made it known that there were wounded passengers on board, that the plane had been badly damaged, causing low air pressure inside the cabin, and – as if that were not enough – that their fuel was running out. But the Maltese authorities could not be persuaded, and threatened to turn off the airport lights if the aeroplane tried to land.
HOSTAGES MURDERED
With great skill and courage, Galal managed to bring the plane down safely, despite the fact that it was damaged and he could not see where he was going. Once on the ground, the Maltese Prime Minister Carmelo Mifsud decided to take over negotiations. Unfortunately he and his aides were not very experienced in this kind of situation, and the government were later heavily criticized about the way they handled the crisis. Immediately after the plane landed, it was surrounded by armed Maltese troops (though it later transpired that they did not have any bullets in their guns). Communicating from the airport control tower via an interpreter, Prime Minister Mifsud took a stern line and refused to allow the plane to be refuelled until all the hostages were released. He also refused to withdraw the soldiers surrounding the aircraft.
Initially, two crew members who had been wounded in the fighting on board were allowed to leave the aircraft. Next, 11 passengers were released. But as the Prime Minister and the hijackers reached stalemate on the issue of refuelling and hostage release, the crisis escalated. The hijackers began to shoot passengers at random, beginning with an Israeli woman named Tamar Artzi. Their leader, Omar Mohammed Ali Resaq, then threatened to kill another passenger every quarter of an hour unless the authorities conceded to their demands. Tragically, he was not bluffing: he went on to shoot Nitzal Mendelson, Jacqueline Pflug, Scarlett Rogenkamp, and Patrick Scott Barker. Amazingly, three of them (Artzi, Pflug and Barker) survived.
COMMANDO RAID
Prime Minister Mifsud had played for high stakes in his negotiations, and it now looked as though he was losing. The US, France and Britain, all of whom had highly trained, experienced antiterrorist experts at their disposal, offered to send help, but Mifsud refused. Fearful of becoming entangled in a conflict between the US and the Arab world, the prime minister was trying to steer a neutral path, but dismally failed to resolve the crisis at hand. When Egypt offered to intervene, Mifsud jumped at the chance, allowing their troops to come in and take control of the situation. As it turned out, this proved to be the worst of his mistakes.
The Egyptians flew in a US-trained antiterrorist squad, the 777 Combat Unit, known as ‘Al-Sa’iqa (Thunderbolt), under the leadership of Major-General Kamal Attia, who prepared to storm the plane in a commando-style raid on the morning of November 25. As their name suggested, the squad was not known for its delicacy or patience in situations of conflict. The negotiations continued, but the soldiers could not wait to spring into action and went on to storm the plane an hour and a half before the operation was supposed to take place. In an incredible display of stupidity, they tried to blast off the plane doors and the cargo hold with explosives, causing a fire on the plane that killed many of the passengers. They then stormed the aircraft, shooting at the hijackers and killing further passengers in the process. In a panic, the hijackers also let off hand grenades inside the aeroplane, which added to the carnage. By the end of the raid, 56 out of the 88 passengers who had managed to survive the ordeal so far, lay dead.
TRAGIC BLUNDERS
The blunders continued when the one surviving terrorist, Omar Resaq, who had led the operation, managed to escape. In the confusion of the raid, he was wounded, his lung pierced by a bullet, so he took off his mask, dumped his gun and hand grenades, and pretended to be a passenger. He was sent to the local hospital in an ambulance. It was only when he was in the hospital for treatment that other passengers recognized him as the perpetrator of the attack and reported him. Had they not done so, he might well have escaped detection and walked away a free man.
As the only surviving member of the hijacking team, Resaq was arrested and tried in Malta. He had been seriously injured in the attack, but he recovered enough to face trial there. He was charged on nine counts, including causing the deaths of Mendelson and Rogenkamp, and attempting to kill other passengers. He pleaded guilty to seven of the charges and was given a 25-year sentence. He was jailed in Malta, but actually only served seven years of his sentence before being released. He went to live in Ghana, before being tracked down by FBI agents in Nigeria, who extradited him and brought him to the US for trial. This time, he was given a life sentence without parole.
The hijacking of Egypt Air Flight 648 raised some extremely important issues in terms of the international handling of terror attacks. First, the issue of sky marshals. Should there have been an armed guard on the plane, and should he have opened fire? Many believe that the presence of armed guards on aeroplanes increases the risk of fatalities in terror attacks, either through direct killings as a result of crossfire, or through damaging the aeroplane itself. (Others point to the safety record of El Al, Israel’s national carrier, which has a heavy presence of armed guards on its aircraft, but which has only sustained one terror attack, in 1968.) Next, the issue of negotiations: should countries handle their own talks with terrorists in situations of crisis, as happened in Malta, or should a politically neutral, international negotiating team be called in? And finally, the issue of commando-style armed raids: should they ever be used in situations like these? Or is the human cost of such operations simply too high – as happened in the case of Egypt Air Flight 648?
Enniskillen Massacre
Remembrance Day had just begun,
To honour Ulsters fallen,
And
ended in the massacre,
of Enniskillen town.
From ‘the poppy day massacre’
The Enniskillen Massacre, or Remembrance Day Bombing, as it is also called, took place on November 8, 1987, at the town of Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, during a Remembrance Day church service to commemorate the dead of World War I and II. In a vicious and completely unexpected bomb attack by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), 11 people were killed, and 63 injured. Afterwards, the attack was widely condemned by politicians of all persuasions in Northern Ireland and Britain, and it came to be seen as a turning point in the Northern Irish conflict, ushering in a new era of hope for peace.
Today, the Enniskillen massacre is generally held to be a major tactical error on the part of the IRA, because it thoroughly alienated the general public from the Republican cause. Although there may have been a political motivation for the bombing – one of those present was a reserve member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – the fact that the townspeople of Enniskillen were attacked when they were gathered together quietly with their families to commemorate the dead in a religious service pointed to the inhumanity of the IRA’s campaign. Moreover, when the father of one of the victims publicly forgave his daughter’s killers, the senseless brutality of the political conflict in Northern Ireland was brought into sharp focus, and the need for both sides to move towards a peaceful solution was shown to be more pressing than ever.
BURIED ALIVE
On the morning of Remembrance Sunday, a day dedicated to the memory of all those killed in World War I and II, a small crowd gathered in the centre of Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, to lay wreaths of poppies on the local war memorial. The red poppies were a reminder of the fields of northern France, where so much of the bloodshed took place. All over Britain, similar groups were gathering in towns and villages, in an atmosphere of solemn remembrance, to honour their dead.
