By Gurmukh Singh, IANS
Toronto : Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only man jailed in the 1985 Air India bombing and who completed a five-year prison term Friday, failed to walk out a free man.
Since he faces a fresh trial for lying under oath during his testimony at the Air India trial of co-accused Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri in 2003, he was shifted from the jail to a pre-trial centre in Vancouver.
His perjury trial begins at the British Columbia Supreme Court March 7.
Though Reyat has applied for bail, his application is unlikely to come up for hearing till next month.
A spokesman for British Columbia attorney general Wally Oppal’s office said that since Reyat faces the perjury trial, “He is in custody while awaiting that.”
Indian-born Reyat is accused of lying as many as 27 times while testifying at the trial of Malik and Bagri in 2003. The trial had ended in the acquittal of both the suspects.
As the date for Reyat’s trial approached, there was speculation that in order to avoid perjury trial he might strike a deal with the prosecution for a lesser jail term.
Since the maximum jail term for perjury is 14 years, many families of the Air India victims were reportedly not happy when informed about the pending deal by the Crown.
Later, it turned out that he had refused the offer.
It is also by striking a deal with the prosecution that Reyat had received just five years in jail in the Kanishka bombing that killed all 329 people on board on June 23, 1985. He had admitted guilty to manslaughter in the tragedy, and was put behind bars on Feb 9, 2003.
Reyat, 45, had helped mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar assemble and test two explosives used in bombing Air India flights in retaliation to the army action at the Golden Temple in 1984.
On June 23, 1985, one bomb brought down Kanishka off the Irish coast and another – meant for the Air India Tokyo-Mumbai flight – killed two baggage handlers at Tokyo airport.
Before his five-year jail term for the Kanishka bombing, Reyat had spent 10 years in prison for his role in making the bomb that killed two Japanese baggage handlers.