The cockpit voice recorder aboard Air India Flight 182 recorded a hissing sound - probably the fuselage tearing open - and a scream. After that, nothing. The airliner disintegrated 10km over the Atlantic Ocean, off the southwestern tip of Ireland. None of the 329 aboard - mostly Canadians - survived. Sixty of them were children.
That was June, 1985, the worst mass murder in Canadian history. It was also one of the most shocking acts of peacetime terrorism on record. But today, almost exactly 19 years later, we still do not know who planted the bomb that did it. All we have is a hiss and a scream, and people like Perviz Madon, sitting in a Vancouver courtroom, waiting to find out who killed her husband and father of two children.
'It's taking a toll on our daily lives and it's very emotional,' said the 55-year-old woman. 'But it's important to be here.'
The unsolved case of Air India flight 182 has left Canadians with some hard questions about the competence of the police and the Canadian intelligence services. We may be living in a post-9/11 world of sophisticated anti-terrorist technology; we may have cross-referenced databases of the bad and the dangerous; we may have systems for 'homeland security' and early warnings. But we still can't say who blew an airplane out of the sky 19 years ago.
It is not as if the two prime suspects, R.S. Malik and A.S. Bagri, are master criminals. One is a multimillionaire with a clothing business and a resort hotel. The other is a mill worker. They were both known Sikh activists living in western Canada, furious at the Indian government for its attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984. A month after the Amritsar attack, Bagri called for the death of 50,000 Hindus. Police even caught the bomb maker. He claimed he did not know what the bombs would be used for, and so he was sentenced to only five years in prison.
One of the most controversial aspects of the case is that Malik, a wealthy man with an 11-man defence team, actually got several million dollars in legal aid from the government because, he said, the family fortune was in his wife's name.
