VANCOUVER - The only man ever convicted in the Air India bombings will be a free man for the first time in more than two decades after the B.C. Court of Appeal granted him bail on perjury charges.
Inderjit Singh Reyat has served more than 20 years behind bars for two separate convictions related to the incident that claimed 331 lives in a blast off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985 and a same-day explosion at Narita airport in Japan.
Reyat served his entire sentence for those two convictions but he remained behind bars facing perjury charges for his testimony at the trial of two men accused of taking part in the plot.
The B.C. Supreme Court earlier denied Reyat bail on accusations that he lied while testifying at the trial that ended in acquittals for Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik.
Justice Ian Josephson labelled Reyat an "unmitigated liar under oath" in his ruling acquitting Malik and Bagri of the bombing deaths.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Patrick Dohm denied Reyat bail on the grounds that his detention was necessary to maintain confidence in the justice system but his lawyer asked the Appeal Court in June to reconsider.
"He's been in jail a long time," his lawyer, Ian Donaldson, said outside the court after the decision.
"He doesn't know yet, but I'm sure that he'll be pleased when he hears."
Reyat faces several conditions for his release but those decisions have not been released.
It's believed the plot against Air India was hatched by militant extremists in B.C. who were allegedly retaliating against the government-owned airline for a raid on the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine.
Two baggage handlers died when luggage being transferred from an Air India flight exploded at Narita airport and 329 passengers and crew were killed when Flight 182 went down off the coast of Ireland.
Reyat's trial on the perjury charges is scheduled for next January.
4 comments:
More damn Muslims!!!
No, RealCanadian, these folks aren't Muslims, althought their religion does have some distant relationship to Islam -- as Islam has to Christianity... .
Here is an interesting twist to Reyat's case. If Reyat did not buy the tuner and security agencies witheld this information from his lawyers then one is left wondering whether Reyat admitted to plea-bargaining in a bid to end never ending saga of trial/charges that kept coming at him? If Crown's case was solid, then why did they made deals for reduced charges? I leave this for legal minds like James Morton and others but we as Canadians need to push our government to disclose & discpline the culprit(s) who tampered with sealed documents stored in RCMP's headquarter between 1992 and 2003. We all know about destruction of certain evidence(audio recordings etc.) by CSIS in mid 1980's but not many people know that someone tempered with sealed boxes in RCMP's headquarter in Vancouver between 1992 and 2003. Read below story from Globe & Mail's Feb. 26, 2003 edition;
Title:Reyat didn't buy tuner used in Narita bombing, testimony revealed. Author(s):Robert Matas. Source:Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada) (Feb 26, 2003)(723 words) Document Type:Newspaper Bookmark:Bookmark this Document Library Links:
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive
VANCOUVER -- Testimony about a possible cover-up of crucial evidence in the Air-India case and about unexplained tampering with sealed information in a police file was heard shortly before a controversial plea-bargain deal was struck with Inderjit Singh Reyat.
The evidence, presented at the pretrial hearing last month, dealt with the purchase of a $129 Sanyo tuner that police believed contained the bomb that exploded on June 23, 1985, at Japan's Narita Airport, killing two baggage handlers.
One hour later, a bomb explosion aboard an Air-India flight killed 329 people. Police allege the two bombs were placed on the aircraft in Vancouver by Sikh militants seeking revenge against the government of India.
Karen Smith, the salesclerk who sold the tuner used in the Narita bomb, told police that Mr. Reyat was not the man who bought it, Edward Ross Drozda testified in B.C. Supreme Court on Jan. 29.
Mr. Drozda, a retired RCMP officer who worked on the Air-India case from 1985 to 1992, also said that the clerk's statement to police may not have been disclosed to Mr. Reyat's defence lawyers when he was tried and convicted in 1991 of helping to make the bomb that killed the baggage handlers.
The court prohibited the media from reporting Mr. Drozda's testimony until yesterday. Mr. Justice Ian Bruce Josephson of the B.C. Supreme Court lifted the publication ban in response to an application from The Globe and Mail.
Mr. Reyat was convicted in 1991 in part because of police evidence indicating he bought the tuner at a Woolworth store on June 5, 1985. The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the lower court's decision, accepting that "the evidence established that [Mr. Reyat] purchased ... one of only five tuners which could have housed the bomb."
Police linked the tuner to Mr. Reyat after tracing a fragment found at Narita Airport to a stock of tuners at a Woolworth store in Duncan, B.C., the town where Mr. Reyat lived. In August, 1985, police found an unsigned invoice at the store with "R-E-Y-A-T" written in the "deliver to" area.
Under intense police questioning in November, 1985, Mr. Reyat said he bought the tuner and told police where they could find a copy of the receipt. But Mr. Reyat has also contradicted himself, saying a man staying at his home bought the tuner and took it when he left. Mr. Reyat has said he didn't know the man's name.
On the final day of testimony before prosecutors negotiated a plea bargain with Mr. Reyat, Mr. Drozda testified that the salesclerk gave a statement to police on Aug. 19, 1985, about selling the tuner to two South Asian men.
About a month later, she informed police that she happened to see Mr. Reyat, and he was not the person who bought the tuner, Mr. Drozda said. Two days later, Ms. Smith described the purchaser while giving a statement to police while under hypnosis. Her description did not fit Mr. Reyat, the court was told.
However, at Mr. Reyat's trial, neither Mr. Reyat's defence lawyers nor the prosecutors asked Ms. Smith whether the purchaser was in the court room.
Although the pretrial hearing was stopped before Judge Josephson ruled on the significance of failing to disclose Ms. Smith's statements to police, the issue came up in court earlier on another matter.
Mr. Reyat's lawyers had previously argued that evidence collected by police in his home in November, 1985, subject to a search warrant, should be excluded because his constitutional rights had been violated, in part, by the failure to include Ms. Smith's statements in the application for the warrant.
Judge Josephson dismissed defence arguments about the importance of the failure to disclose the information, ruling on Dec. 13, 2002, that it "appears to have been through inadvertence."
During Mr. Drozda's testimony, the court also heard that an unidentified person had tampered with two boxes of sealed documents from the Narita trial.
The boxes, stored at Vancouver RCMP headquarters, contained copies of documents setting out information disclosed to Mr. Reyat's defence lawyers during the Narita trial.
Mr. Drozda testified that the boxes were sealed in 1992 after the trial. But on the day before he testified in the Air-India pretrial hearing, Mr. Drozda discovered the seal was broken. Some material had been removed and other material had been inserted, he said.
Source Citation:Matas, Robert. "Reyat didn't buy tuner used in Narita bombing, testimony revealed." Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada) (Feb 26, 2003): NA. CPI.Q (Canadian Periodicals).
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