A perjury charge has been filed against a Sikh militant who pleaded guilty to helping bomb Air India Flight 182, which was downed off the Irish coast in 1985, but who then denied in court that he knew anything about the conspiracy.
Investigators believe that Inderjit Singh Reyat knew "an awful lot more" than he testified in court about the 1985 attack that killed all 329 people on board the aircraft in history's deadliest bombing of a civilian airliner, prosecution spokesman Geoff Gaul said.
Reyat was charged in British Columbia Supreme Court. He is currently being held in an Ontario prison and is expected to appear a Vancouver court in late March to face the new charge.
Reyat pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter for helping collect materials used to make the bomb, and was later called as a witness against fellow Sikh separatist Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri.
Once on the witness stand, Reyat testified he never asked the name of the bomb maker who stayed at his house in Duncan, British Columbia, for several days, or what the bomb was intended to be used for.
The court found Malik and Bagri not guilty of murder charges last year, but the judge said in his ruling that he believed Reyat was an "an unmitigated liar," whose testimony "bordered on the absurd."
Prosecutors say the bombing of Flight 182 off the Irish coast, and a related attempt to simultaneously destroy a second Air India jet over the Pacific, were the work of Canadian-based Sikh religious separatists who wanted revenge for India's 1984 storming of Sikhism's Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Reyat was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the Flight 182 bombing. He had already served 10 years in prison for his role in the attempt to bomb the second aircraft, which instead killed two Tokyo airport workers.
He is the only person convicted in connection with either bombing. He could be sentenced to up to 14 years in prison if convicted of perjury.
Relatives of those who died in the bomb came to Cork last year for a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the disaster.
Air India Flight 182 was travelling from Montreal to New Delhi and was just 30 minutes from a scheduled stopover at Heathrow when it disappeared off the radar screen of air traffic control at Shannon at 8.13am on June 23rd, 1985.