Who was Ripudaman Singh Malik?

Ripudaman Singh Malik was an accused in the 1985 Air India bombing who was acquitted in 2005. He was shot dead in Surrey, Canada on Thursday morning. The 75-year-old was one of the accused in the 1985 bombing of Air India’s Flight 182 Kanishka that killed as many as 331 people, mostly from Toronto and Vancouver areas.

According to Canadian investigators, a suitcase bomb was loaded onto a plane at Vancouver International Airport and then transferred in Toronto to Air India Flight 182 which exploded off the coast of Ireland, killing 329 passengers and crew. In 2005, Malik and his co-accused, Ajaib Singh Bagri, were acquitted of mass murder and conspiracy charges.

Malik spent nearly four years in prison before his acquittal. He then sought $9.2 million as legal fees but a British Columbia judge rejected his claims for compensation.

In 1972, Malik came to Canada and started off as a cab driver. Later, as a successful businessman, he went on to become the president of a 16,000-member Vancouver-based Khalsa Credit Union (KCU) with assets worth over $110 million. Malik was the president of Satnam Education Society of British Columbia, Canada, and ran Khalsa schools, which besides teaching the Canadian syllabus, also taught Punjabi language and Sikh history.

Malik had last visited India in December 2019 after 25 years following the Narendra Modi government’s decision to remove his name from the ‘blacklist’.

The Indian government had removed 312 names of Sikhs living abroad from the 35-year-old blacklist in September 2019.