Toronto: Canadian authorities have stated that the case of destruction of the Air India flight, Kanishka, by Khalistani terrorists on June 23, 1985, is still an open one. In the interview, Commander of Federal Policing Program in the Pacific Region, Assistant Commissioner David Teboul, said that the Air India investigation is still on and it has been one of the largest and most difficult domestic terrorist probes of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Teboul also invited Canadians to go to the memorials which were established in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa regarding the 329 victims. They pointed out that they are special sites to come and mourn the poor souls and their kin, to express gratitude to those heroes who responded to the catastrophe and investigated it.
”That terror-related loss of life has persisted across generations and remains the single worst terrorist attack in the history of and involving Canadians,” Teboul also posited. The bombing was catastrophic, though it claimed 329 lives only onboard while two baggage handlers at Narita Airport in Japan also died due to another bomb planted for another flight.
The hope is still alive, and there is still room to move in the investigation, even as many years have gone by since the day of the attack, according to Gary Bass, who was involved with the RCMP investigation. Bass and others opined that the day of reckoning came when people with information would come forward to testify, especially after any threats to have implementation toned down.
So far, the only person to be sentenced in connection with the bombings is tractor-bomb manufacturer Inderjit Singh Reyat. Reyat was released on parole in 2017 having been jailed for building the explosive device.
Some of the people of interest for detectives are several individuals who, among other things, were with Reyat during bomb assembly and a person popularly called Mr X who joined Reyat during bomb assembling. The spirit of the attack plan was also framed on Khalistani separatism by the now-retired Justice IB Josephson in a judgment given in 2005 that named Talwinder Singh Parmar as the mastermind.
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