Hartford, Courant,
Speculation that Sikh radicals might have been responsible for the midair destruction of an AirIndia jet with 329 aboard Sunday was denounced Monday by Amarjit Singh Buttar of Vernon, a spokesman for the small Sikh colony in the Hartford area.
“I am upset and hurt at the insinuations that Sikhs are to blame,” said Buttar. “No Sikhs in their right mind would take innocent human lives.”’ And it would be against the basic interests of the Sikhs to antagonize the United States, Canada or Great Britain, he said.
“There is a very large concentration of Sikhs from India in metropolitan areas of Canada, particularly Toronto,” Buttar said. “That plane was undoubtedly full of Sikhs and it would be stupid, as well as against our religion, to kill our own people.
The Boeing 747, en route from Toronto to India with stops in Montreal and London, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean 120 miles southwest of the Irish coast after apparently being ripped apart by an explosion. Nearly an hour before the AirIndia crash, a bomb concealed in baggage from a Canadian Pacific flight from Vancouver, British Columbia, killed two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 5, 1985
