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It’s not just that the Sikh Temple Sukh Sagar happened to be right out my kitchen window, or that I ended up covering Atwal’s trial for the Vancouver Sun. Atwal was a member of the terrorist-listed International Sikh Youth Federation, and it just so happened that its leader, Amrik Singh, had insisted on acting as my interpreter two years before the Sidhu ambush, while I was interviewing various Khalistani holy warriors in Amritsar, Punjab. At the time, Khalistani militias, most notably Babbar Khalsa, had transformed Amritsar’s Golden Temple Complex, the Sikh Vatican, into a heavily fortified barracks, arms depot and terrorist command centre. But that’s not the half of it.

Photo by Redman/AP

On June 21, 1985, I said goodbye to my Uncle Phil and my cousins in the town of Midleton, County Cork, after paying them a visit. Two days later, in London, the television news was suddenly awash with the horror of the Kanishka, a Boeing 747 passenger plane, Air India Flight 182 out of Toronto, bound for New Delhi. It had fallen into the sea in pieces off the Irish coast, west of Cork Harbour, out towards the Sheep’s Head Peninsula. There had been 329 people on board, almost all of them Canadians, mostly from the Toronto area. More than 80 were children. Six were babies.

I’d happened to be a passenger on that very airplane only the year before, and straight away it occurred to me that I almost certainly knew exactly who had murdered all those people. As things were to turn out, I was right, and that’s the horrible, still-beating heart of the Air India tragedy — there was nothing exceptional about what I knew. You didn’t need to be an agent with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service or the Research and Analysis Wing of India’s foreign intelligence service to be confidently certain about who had committed the Air India atrocity.