VANCOUVER – Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only person the RCMP and the Canadian legal system could find to hold accountable for their shoddy and expensive investigations and trials, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions dollars and largely due to their own incompetence, was released from a halfway house this week after serving way more jail time then he was legally awarded.
According to a Parole Board of Canada decision delivered late last month, Reyat will be granted more freedom to live at home but will still face restrictions.
The board credited Reyat for embracing an anti-violence perspective since the bombings, which ended the lives of 331 people, even though psychologists have warned that view could disappear under the wrong circumstances.
“According to psychological assessments your risk to re-offend is low, however if there were a threat to your Sikh cause, your risk for future… group violence is high,” the parole board’s Jan. 26 decision reads.
There’s no information to suggest that cause is currently under threat, the board added.
“There have been no police concerns since your release, and the High Risk Target Team is supportive of the removal of your [halfway house] condition,” the parole board wrote.
It’s unclear where Reyat could be living, but he remains under several other release conditions.
RCMP and Crown wanted Reyat to sing like a canary but Rwyat said what he had been saying all along that he does not know who actually made the bombs and who put the bombs on the plane and that he did not assembled the parts to be made into a bomb for the Air India plane. Even the Crown and the Defence agreed when Reyat signed a sworn statement of fact that “Reyat only gathered the parts that could be made into a bomb but that he never actually assembled a bomb and don’t know who did.”
Reyat was charged with perjury in 2006 for what the Judge claimed was Reyat found “repeatedly lying” during his testimony at a trial into the bombing deaths of 331 people, mostly Canadians.
But Reyat’s lawyer Ian Donaldson had argued that his client’s perjury conviction should be overturned because of an error by the trial judge in his instructions to the jury.
Donaldson said he wanted to establish which of the 19 alleged lies that the jury all agreed on since they were allowed to believe any one of them to convict Reyat as instructed by the trial judge. In any case, an in-depth study of Reyat shows him to be a classic “Patsy”, who was used by others, including one Mr. X, largely believed to be an Indian intelligence agent working with a known Khalistani at the time, in the name of an alleged “Holy War.”
Reyat was found guilty in 2010 and sentenced to a record nine years in prison, or seven years and seven months after accounting for time served. Under the law, offenders must be granted statutory release after they have served two thirds of their sentence.
Reyat, considered a “scapegoat” for RCMP’s incompetence by many familiar with the Air India case, was forced to be a Crown witness at the trial of Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, who were acquitted in the biggest case of aviation terrorism before the 9-11 attacks in the U.S
The culprits behind the twin bombings – which were designed to happen while the two Air India planes were on the tarmac rather than in the air – are believed to a mix of Indian government agents and Sikh militants in a conspiracy designed to discredit the Sikh community.
Reyat’s lawyer, Ian Donaldson, told the Appeal Court that the perjury verdict was unfair because the jury may not have been unanimous. He argued the jury should have been directed to agree on at least one false statement. The Appeal Court judges disagreed.
Until Reyat’s conviction, the longest perjury sentence ever handed down in Canada was six years for a case in Alberta.
Reyat is the only man found guilty in connection to the An Air India bombing. And even though in a statement of fact both the Crown and the Defence agreed that Reyat only gathered the parts that could be made into a bomb but that he never actually assembled a bomb and don’t know who did – he was given one of the longest sentences for lying while testifying in the Air India trial.
The perjury or lies that Reyat is accused to refers to him refusing to divulge the information that RCMP wanted him to do about who was involved in the conspiracy to bomb the plane but Reyat has said all along that he doesn’t know anything about the conspiracy and who was allegedly involved.
Reyat was found guilty because the Crown said he did know who was involved despite Reyat’s pleadings that he did not.
Since the Air India judge had already written in his verdict that Reyat lied on the stand so the jury simply went with that, acknowledging that since the Judge said Reyat was lying then he must be lying and found him guilty. He was then given a lengthy nine year sentence.
But Reyat’s lawyer wanted to establish which of the 19 alleged lies that the jury all agreed on since they were allowed to believe any one of them to convict Reyat as instructed by the trial judge.
Reyat, who has served more time than he was actually legally given sentences for, has been made a scapegoat for RCMP-CSIS’s incompetent police work. Reyat is also being punished for refusing to name names as the RCMP has tried to get him to do, bribing him with witness protection and money.
But Reyat has refused to budge and continues to maintain that he did not know who was actually involved in the conspiracy and doesn’t have anything to do with the people who actually placed bombs on the planes.
Reyat has said and he continues to say that he never intended to build a bomb or to bomb any planes and that at the height of the abuses by the State of India against Sikhs – he was asked and willingly helped in any way that he could for the Sikh militant cause. But that he never agreed to any terrorist plots or killing innocents – at least that’s what he specifically said in an interview more than a decade ago.
In the only interview he has given to any Canadian media – Reyat told the LINK editor R. Paul Dhillon many years ago that he did not have anything to do with the Air India bombing and he does not know who did, which he has maintained since then despite the police and the court system dumping on him and making him the only person they could find to pin the murders of 331 people.
Reyat’s current sentence expires in August 2018.
