VANCOUVER,
British Columbia-Police arrested Talwinder Singh Parmar and Inderjit Singh Riat in connection with the crash of an Air India Jumbo Jet that killed 329 people and a bombing at Tokyo’s airport that killed two baggage handlers, Officials said Thursday.
The arrests were made late Wednesday by a 66man Royal Canadian Mounted Police task force during a series of raids on Vancouver area Sikh militants, who have been advocating the formation of a separate Sikh nation in India’s northern Punjab state.
Inderjit Singh Riat, a marine mechanic from Duncan, located about 50 miles from Vancouver, and Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Sikh priest, of the Vancouver subur Burnaby, about 50 miles west of Vancouver, were charged by police late Thursday with possession of unlawful explosives, said David Gibbons, the attorney for the two. Riat also received a weapons charge, Gibbons added.
“This action was taken as part of an investigation relating to an explosion at Japan’s Narita Airport and the downing of Air India Flight 182 on June 23,” Police Lyman Henschel said.
“Two individuals are being held pending investigation and a num of others are being questioned. charges have not been laid, no comment can be made at this time.”
Several weapons and documents were also seized during the raids, police said.
The Province, 2 Vancouver daily newspaper, reported the Mounties are convinced that both the Air India disaster and an explosion the same day at Narita airport were caused by bombs made in the Vancouver area.
The Narita blast, which occurred about an hour after the Air India airliner mysteriously crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off Ireland’s southern coast, killed two Japanese baggage handlers.
Parmar, founder of the fundamentalist Sikh group Babar KhaIsa, is wanted by Indian authorities in the deaths of two Indian police officers.
Parmar’s wife, Surinder, told the Province that 15 officers searched her house for four hours and “took away my husband.” The Mounties have been investigating the possibility a bomb was smuggled aboard a Vancouver to Toronto flight and placed aboard the by Air India jumbo jet that was en route to Bombay.
Canadian and Japanese police have also confirmed the Narita Bomb was smuggled aboard a Canadian Pacific Air flight from Vancouver to Tokyo in a Sanyo stereo component.
The stereo tuner, which police traced by serial numbers to a Vancouver sales distributor, was to be loaded aboard a connecting flight in Tokoyo to India. The bomb, however, exploded in the airport baggage compartment. Canadian, Indian and U.S. investigators have said several pieces of wreckage recently pulled from the ocean floor showed that pieces of wreckage were punctured in a manner consistent with an explosion.
The Vancouver Sikh community numbering about 80,000 is one of the largest in North America.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 15, 1985
