Air India plane terrorist bids to return to Midlands
A terrorist bomb-maker has asked for permission to be returned to the West Midlands after serving more than 20 years in a Canadian prison for his part in one of the deadliest airline attacks in history.
Inderjit Singh Reyat was the only person to be convicted in connection with the 1985 Air India atrocity which claimed 331 lives.
The former Jaguar Land Rover worker was released in January this year after serving two-thirds of a nine-year sentence for perjury.
The devout Sikh had previously served more than 15 years in prison for making the bombs that were placed into two suitcases and planted on planes leaving Vancouver.
One bomb blew up Air India Flight 182 as it neared the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard.
The second exploded at Japan’s Narita Airport, killing two baggage handlers as they transferred cargo.
The attack took place during an Indian crackdown on Sikhs fighting for an independent homeland, and was alleged to be revenge for the storming of the religion’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, by Indian troops in June 1984.
Father-of-three Reyat fled from Vancouver just months after the bombing. With his wife, he moved into a modest home in Barker Butts Lane, in the Coundon district of Coventry, and secured a job as a specialist electrician at the Jaguar car plant in Browns Lane.
It was while he was on his way to work that he was arrested by armed West Midlands Police officers in a dramatic dawn swoop.
He was extradited to Canada in 1989 and was jailed for ten years after pleading guilty to manslaughter and admitting that he made the bomb that exploded at Narita Airport.
Canadian prosecutors then spent the next 12 years trying to prove Reyat’s part in the Air India Flight 182 bombing, too, and they eventually struck a plea bargain deal.
His charges would be dropped to manslaughter in return for Reyat admitting that he was the bomb-maker in that strike as well.
Reyat has been ordered to live at a halfway house until August 2018, when his perjury sentence would normally expire, and abide by several conditions set by the parole board, including having no contact with victims’ families or alleged former co-conspirators, and taking part in no political activities.
He must also obtain counselling to address violent tendencies, a lack of empathy and “cognitive distortions.”
A family friend said Reyat had now formally requested that he be allowed to return to the West Midlands after completing his sentence.
The supporter, who did not want to be named, said:
In 2010, Reyat was convicted of lying while testifying in the mass murder trial of alleged co-conspirators Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, who were later acquitted for a lack of evidence. He had avoided being tried alongside the pair by pleading guilty to a lesser manslaughter.
Reyat’s nine-year perjury sentence was the longest ever handed down by a Canadian court, and the trial the country’s most costliest.
A spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada said it could not comment on individual cases.