Air India Flight 182 disaster

Air India Flight 182 disaster, passenger jet explosion off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, that claimed the lives of all 329 passengers and crew members. Sikh extremists were accused of sabotaging the Air India aircraft, and one suspect was convicted in 2003.

Flight 182 was en route from Toronto to London, continuing to Bombay (now Mumbai). After a routine stop in Montreal, where Canadian officials removed three suspicious packages from the aircraft, the flight departed for London as scheduled and established communication with Heathrow Airport’s tower. But just 45 minutes from its destination, the jet disintegrated in midair. No warning or emergency calls were issued. As the plane disappeared from radar screens, Heathrow staff dispatched emergency rescue crews, but no survivors were found. Only 131 bodies were retrieved from the sea.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but airline officials suspected Sikh extremists of planting a bomb on the aircraft; in the early 1980s India was embroiled in violent civil unrest between Sikh and Hindu factions. Five months after the disaster, two suspects were arrested. Canadian police believed that one of the suspects, Talwinder Singh Parmar, had masterminded the attack, but charges against him were ultimately dropped. He was later killed by police in India. The other suspect arrested at that time, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was a Sikh residing in Vancouver. He eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter in connection with the bombing and was sentenced to five years in prison in 2003. Reyat previously had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for helping to build a bomb that killed two baggage handlers at Japan’s Narita Airport on the same day as the Flight 182 disaster. Two other suspects, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, were arrested in 2000, but they were acquitted on insufficient evidence in 2005.

In 2006 a Canadian commission was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the bombing of Air India Flight 182. In its five-volume report, which was released in 2010, the panel concluded that the disaster resulted from a “cascading series of errors.” In particular, it found that Canadian intelligence and security agencies had failed to share information with each other and had instead engaged in “turf wars.”