DUBAI
Gerry Boudreault was a hoodlum, a petty criminal, a jail bird; he knew his way around police cars, courts, the inside of a cell. He knew how to hustle to make a buck, how to make a deal to cut time stent in prison when to keep his mouth shut — and when to rat to the police.
“I had done some bad things in my time, done my time in jail, but putting a bomb on a plane ... not me,” Boudreault admits. Even low-life scum have a code of honour. “I went to police.”
In August 1984, Boudreault claimed that a criminal associate, Talwinder Singh Parmar, showed him a suitcase filled with $200,000. It was Boudreault’s if he’d plant a bomb on an Air India flight.
And when the hustler-turned rat spilled his guts to a police informer, the warning fell on deaf ears.
And just days later there was a second warning — this time from Harmail Singh Grewal in Vancouver. He was facing time in jail for theft and fraud — and the information that he had might shave off some time. He opened up to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about a plot to bomb the regular Air India flight from Montreal.
Grewal’s claim was dismissed — he was unreliable, CSIS deemed, and was singing to save his skin.
Boudreault’s warning with CSIS about Parmar had dismissed, and CSIS and the RCMP were rivals in the security and intelligence business, working independently and at cross purposes. But CSIS wiretappers had recorded nine telephone calls between Parmar’s residence in Vancouver and that of Inderjit Singh Reyat, a car mechanic in Duncan on Vancouver Island.
Canadian authorities became aware of Reyat as a result of a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Unites States. The FBI had uncovered a plot to assassinate Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi during a visit to America.
Slowly, the 200 RCMP officers on the bombing case were beginning tom make progress. No bomb parts were recovered from the ocean, but the investigators had concrete pieces to work with — from the deadly Narita bomb scene. There, the bomb was placed in a Sanyo stereo tuner — and the serial numbers showed it had been shipped to Vancouver, Canada for sale. A team of 135 officers were checking every store that could have sold Sanyo tuners. And Reyat bought one in Duncan.
The Mounties were closing in one their man — but needed help from CSIS for surveillance. That’s when they discovered Reyat was already being watched by CSIS. The intelligence agency, set up a year before — had witnessed Reyat visit a television repair shop with a partially disassembled car clock wired to a lantern battery.
Even more troubling was that in mid-May, CSIS had seen Reyat go into the woods, to test a bomb made up of a 12-volt battery, cardboard cylinder, gunpowder, and some dynamite. It failed to go off.
Despite all of the warnings, law enforcement and intelligence officials in Canada failed to put the pieces of the plot together. The RCMP and CSIS only went into the Duncan woods after it became clear the Narita and Kaniskha bombing on June 23 were linked.
Suspecting is one thing — proving in a court of law is another. The only evidence they had then linked Reyat to the Narita bombing.
It would be 12 years before Reyat would be sentenced to five years in prison in a Vancouver Court after pleading guilty to manslaughter of 329 people in the deadliest crime in Canadian history. In a plea deal to testify against two other suspects — Ripudaman Singh Malik of Vancouver and Bagri — Reyat admitted he gathered material for a bomb that police said brought down the Kaniskha. Both Bagri and Malik were acquitted in 2005 after a two-year trial.
