Ripudaman Singh Malik, who was acquitted in the 1985 Air India terrorist bombings, won’t bring closure to the families of the terrorists attack’s victims, according to a former B.C.
premier.“This doesn’t bring us any closer to closure for the Air India families, in fact — it opens up wounds for Mr. Malik’s family that he’s left behind, and they have this loss to contend with,” Ujjal Dosnjh, who served as B.C.’s first Indo-Canadian premier, told CKNW’s The Jas Johal Show.“No one is a winner in this.” Ripudaman Singh Malik, acquitted in 1985 Air India bombing, shot dead in Surrey, B.C.
Dosnjh was a law student when he first met Malik in the 1970s. At the time, Malik was a “ganja smoking ponytail hippy” with a business in Gastown.He said something changed in Malik in the late 1970s, as he became more focused on religion and, with Dosanjh’s help, set up a society to found a Sikh religious school.Following the Indian government’s raid on the Golden Temple in 1984, and the subsequent massacre of Sikhs, he said Malik was drawn deeper into religious radicalism.“I think Mr.
Malik got swept up in that and had become a fundamentalist, had become a supporter of the extremists,” he said.The blockbuster acquittal of Malik and co-accused Ajaib Singh Bagri on charges of mass murder and conspiracy in the Air India bombings that killed 331 people, most of them Canadian, was a tragedy for the victims’ families, Dosanjh said.But he said the apparently targeted killing of Malik isn’t justice for those families either, who deserved to see a successful prosecution, conviction and imprisonment.“My heart also goes out to the families of the Air India tragedy that were left behind, their loved ones downed the with Air India into the Irish Sea,.