On June 23, 1985, 329 people died when an explosion brought down Air India Flight 182 on its way to London, England. The flight originated in Montreal and crashed off the coast of Ireland. No one on board survived, including 280 Canadian citizens. Almost 40 years later, few Canadians remember this, the deadliest terrorist incident in Canada’s history..A new Angus Reid Institute poll finds that nine-in-ten Canadians have little (61%) or no (28%) knowledge of the worst single instance of the mass killing of their fellow citizens, with three-in-five (58%) of those younger than 35 saying they have never even heard of it. In British Columbia, where the conspiracy to commit the bombings was hatched, and Ontario, where many of the victims lived, awareness is higher, but fewer than one-in-six in each province say they know a lot about the attack..As some Canadians — evidently few — reflect on the 38th anniversary of Canada’s worst terrorist tragedy, the sense among many is that more should be done to remember the victims. Among those who are most aware, more than two-in-five (42%) say that Canada has not done enough. This is perhaps reflected in the low levels of awareness among the population..A handful of members were arrested and tried for the Air India bombing, but the only person convicted was Inderjit Singh Reyat, a dual British-Canadian national. The member of the International Sikh Youth Federation who lived in Duncan, BC, pleaded guilty in 2003 to manslaughter. The auto mechanic and electrician was sentenced to 15 years in prison for assembling the bombs that exploded on board Air India Flight 182 and in a separate but related incident at Narita, Japan..The investigation and prosecution was the most expensive in Canadian history, lasting almost 20 years, and costing Canadian taxpayers almost $130 million..Former Supreme Court Justice John C. Major conducted a commission of inquiry. His report, released June 17, 2010, concluded a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) allowed the terrorist attack to take place..In September 1984, in an attempt to get his sentence for theft and fraud reduced, Harmail Singh Grewal of Vancouver told CSIS and the RCMP of the plot to bomb the flight from Montreal. Both reports were dismissed as unreliable..The recordings of hundreds of hours of phone calls made in 1985 by Talwinder Singh Parmar, a well-known Sikh extremist and a prime suspect in the Air India bombing, were later erased by CSIS. The wiretap recordings were made three months before the flight. Some written summaries of the calls remained, but the recordings themselves were erased in what was described as routine policy..Crown prosecutor James Jardine told the inquiry CSIS balked at his repeated requests for the agency to share its intelligence to be used in prosecuting suspects in the case..James Warren, retired head of the counterterrorism unit at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told the inquiry, "I found absolutely nothing in files to suggest a request had ever been made or that anyone had ever considered saving the tapes.”
