Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
The As It Happens Files (24 page)
In April 2003, Messrs. Bagri and Malik finally went on trial for the murder of 329 people aboard Air India Flight 182. (Reyat, you will remember, had pleaded guilty in February 2003 of supplying materials used to make the bomb that took
down Flight 182.) In March 2005, Justice Ian B. Josephson handed down a verdict that shocked the country: Ajaib Singh Bagri—not guilty on all counts; Ripudaman Singh Malik—not guilty on all counts.
After 20 years and more than $100 million, the longest and most expensive investigation and trial in Canadian history, concerning the worst terrorism case in Canadian history, had failed to find anyone guilty.
Here’s some of what Judge Josephson had to say in his six-hundred-page judgment:
Words are incapable of adequately conveying the senseless horror of these crimes. These hundreds of men, women and children were entirely innocent victims of a diabolical act of terrorism unparalleled until recently in aviation history and finding its roots in fanaticism at its basest and most inhumane level.…
I began by describing the horrific nature of these cruel acts of terrorism, acts which cry out for justice. Justice is not achieved, however, if persons are convicted on anything less than the requisite standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Despite what appear to have been the best and most earnest of efforts by the police and the Crown, the evidence has fallen markedly short of that standard.
Josephson said he found the credibility of many of the Crown witnesses wholly wanting. One of the witnesses had been paid three hundred thousand dollars by the RCMP. (The police said it was to cover expenses.) Another witness revealed herself to be inconsistent and, apparently, a disappointed lover. One potential witness was dead: the newspaper publisher Tara Singh Hayer. He had been expected to
testify about what he knew of the accused and their behaviour in the Indian community, but he’d been killed in 1998.
And there was Reyat, the bomb-maker, who had been sentenced to only five years in prison. Laughable as that sentence was, everyone had assumed that the Crown must have made a deal with Reyat to testify against Bagri and/or Malik, though the Crown always denied it.
In Josephson’s judgment, Reyat’s testimony was “intentionally vague and evasive, often bordering on the absurd.” He found Reyat to be “an unmitigated liar under oath.” And he added: “[Reyat’s] hollow expression of remorse must have been a bitter pill for the families of the victims. If he harboured even the slightest degree of genuine remorse, he would have been more forthcoming.”
It
was
a bitter pill for the families who were awaiting justice, as were the acquittals of Bagri and Malik. The Air India families still had no one to blame for the deliberate act of terrorism that had taken the lives of their loved ones 20 years earlier. Lata Pada was among those who’d made the trek to Vancouver to hear the verdict. On the air that night, she told us she was devastated.
As you can imagine, Mary Lou, this is really a dark day for all of us. It’s re-living the tragedy that befell us 20 years ago, and we’re feeling as though we’re experiencing another tragedy. It’s a travesty of justice. The verdict is an indictment against the justice system that we believed in.
Ms. Pada acknowledged that the case had had holes in it and that some of the witnesses were problematic, but she worried that the “not guilty” verdict would send a message to the world that terrorists could commit terrible acts and get away with them.
Vancouver Sun
reporter Kim Bolan told us she was surprised, too; she’d hoped for at least one “guilty” verdict. But since the judge had made it clear that he didn’t find any of the key witnesses believable, there seemed to be little ground for appeal.
On our Talkback line, many others expressed their disappointment with the Air India verdict. Perhaps the most thoughtful response, though, came from Joe Young of Lance, Nova Scotia. He said that he’d nearly cried while listening to Lata Pada on the day the verdict was delivered, but all the same, he had never been prouder of our justice system. Judge Josephson, he thought, must have wanted as much as anyone to find someone responsible for the Air India outrage; he must have felt great pressure to deliver the outcome he knew everyone wanted. Other courts in other countries would have made sure to find
someone
guilty. The fact that Josephson could not was proof of his courage and steadfastness in upholding Canadian law, and we should be thankful for it.
For himself, Justice Josephson has never spoken publicly about the Air India case. He said what he needed to say in his judgment, he told me when I approached him—except for one talk he gave to Justice Department lawyers in Ottawa in 2007. In that address, he spoke about the level of security they’d had to install in the courtroom in Vancouver to make the hearing safe for its participants and about the use they’d made of modern technology in the handling and recording of testimony. The only mention he made of the pressure he might have felt came toward the end, and his words echoed those of our Talkback caller:
How essential judicial independence is to our judicial system was never made more clear to me. The pressures were
significant, but I was free to do exactly what my judicial conscience led me to do.
Was justice done where Bagri and Malik were concerned? Who knows? Our system demands the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and the Court said that the prosecution had failed to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt, so we have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
When I asked Anant Anantaraman for his reaction to the Air India verdict, he told me, “I don’t care. It doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t expect anything. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to think about it.” Even with all he’d accomplished, 20 years after the death of his wife and daughters, the loss was still too painful to think about. But two years later, when I told him I wanted to write about this and about him, he agreed, and when Claire Heistek said that she believed the Air India story would not have been such a cock-up if the victims hadn’t been Indo-Canadian, he agreed with that, too. For all our sakes, I hope that we at least learned something from what happened in June 1985.
Mike the Headless Chicken
Radio for fur and fowl weather
I
f you want to talk about endurance, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a more illustrative case than Mike the Headless Chicken. It was Mark Ulster who noticed one day that the good people of Fruta, Colorado, were about to celebrate their second annual Mike the Headless Chicken Festival to honour the memory of a Wyandotte rooster who refused to die even after he’d had his head chopped off. He ran away instead. (Kind of puts old Ignacio Siberio in the shade, doesn’t it?)
As Sally Edginton of Fruta’s Chamber of Commerce tells the story, it was one Farmer Olsen who did the dirty deed (i.e., the chopping), and he was so impressed by Mike’s determination to go on,
sans
head, that he decided to help him stay alive. The Olsens, Mike’s would-be executioners, became his guardians and caterers instead, trying to keep him from bumping into things when he ran around and feeding little pellets directly down his—well, throat, I guess.
I know, I know; it’s tragic. But Mike pressed on and so did we.
ML: Why didn’t they put him out of his misery, if I can use the word?
SE: Well, apparently, Mike really wasn’t in that much misery, because he was trying to crow, and from the
reports that I’ve read, he acted just like an ordinary rooster. I assume he thought he was blind.
ML: He didn’t know he didn’t have a head.
SE: No. He was fed and watered, and he was in the chicken yard and, basically, went on as a chicken.
ML: I know people have said unkind things about chickens’ brains, but don’t they need
some
brain to operate? To move?
SE: Well, that was my reaction when I heard about this chicken without a head, but they took him to Salt Lake City, and the University of Utah scientists there checked him out and determined that there was enough of his brain stem left for him to function.
ML: Enough in the neck.
SE: Right. The university tried to re-enact Mike with a chicken that they had put under anaesthesia, and it just didn’t work. So there was something unique to Mike.
ML: Mike
was
pretty special. Eighteen months he lived?
SE: Eighteen months.
ML: And he went on tour?
SE: He toured the west. I know there are reports out there that he toured all over the nation, but all that I can discover is Salt Lake City south to San Diego and to Long Beach. He travelled around with a two-headed calf.
ML: Oh my gosh.
SE: I know. But he would preen and crow—and sleep with his neck under his wing.
ML: Aw.
SE: I guess he gained weight. “He was a fine specimen of a rooster,” to quote Mr. Olsen. “He just didn’t happen to have his head.”
ML: What did he die of eventually?
SE: Mike choked to death on a kernel of corn [choking sounds heard—mine]. I know. Poor Mike.
Sally Edginton went on to talk about the festival, and I asked her what sort of events they had. She said they started off with a 5K run, which they dubbed “Run Like a Headless Chicken.” Then they had chicken dinner and chicken games—egg tosses, egg races—and “Pin the Head on the Chicken.”
ML: Ms. Edginton, is any of this true?
SE: Mike is
true!
He really is true. In fact, he was written up by
Life
magazine in the October 22nd issue, 1945. They have photos there, and if you’d like to see a photo of Mike, you can go to the Net.
ML: He won’t be standing on his head.
SE: No, as far as I know, he never stood on his head.
Sally assured us that the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival in Fruta was to celebrate Mike’s will to live, not his headlessness—and high time, too, I say. But, then, what about Louetta Mallard’s little dog Dosha, another unfortunate American animal? Doesn’t he deserve a festival or a laurel of some kind, too? Dosha, apparently, stepped out to pee one day and took it into his head to jump the fence and go on a spree instead. Sadly, he was hit by a car and left to die at the side of the road. Luckily, the police came along while Dosha was still alive. Sadly, again, instead of taking Dosha to the vet, they shot him. (Didn’t have no time to be
going to the vet, apparently.) Then the police took the “carcass” to the Public Works yard, and the people there stuck him in a freezer until the Humane Society could come along and collect the remains. Luckily, the Humane Society folk noticed that Dosha, although well chilled, wasn’t actually, technically
dead
—more remaining than remaindered, in a manner of speaking. They set to thawing him out and setting his broken bones, and Dosha and Louetta lived happily ever after.
Not everyone who’s hosted
As It Happens
is wild about what people have sometimes called our “stupid animal stories”—or so I’ve heard. But our four-and six-footed friends, and some with no feet at all, have provided us with hours of diversion, and the audience would seem to share our fondness for them, at home and abroad. Remember Bonnie and Clyde, our ham on the lam in Malmesbury? They developed such a following in England that the BBC made a movie about their escapade. In 2004 Lynn Horsford (not making this up) came on the show to tell us about
The Legend of the Tamworth Two.
She said they had several pigs playing the parts of the two original truants, partly so as not to tire them out and partly because they couldn’t find another two pigs that could master all the skills required to re-enact the jumping, running, swimming and so on that the originals had got up to. Bit of a porcine Olympics, really. I haven’t seen the final product, but I’m sure it will pop up one day on the Discovery Channel; at least, I hope so.
Probably Ms. Horsford had not then heard about Mouse the Talking Pig, or they might have found a role for
her
in the movie. We didn’t hear about her either until November 2005. That’s when we spoke to Mike Rees at his farm in Bridgend, Wales.