VANCOUVER -- The only person to serve time in prison in connection to the 1985 Air India bombing will be released this week after serving two-thirds of his sentence for perjury.

Inderjit Singh Reyat will reach the mandatory statutory release date for his nine-year sentence on Wednesday, according to Patrick Storey, a spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada. He added that Reyat may have been released on Tuesday.

Reyat was convicted of perjury after he lied during the trial of two men accused in the airplane bombing that killed 329 people. Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter for helping build the bomb, but his two co-accused were acquitted.

The remainder of Reyat’s sentence will be served in the community, with eight conditions placed on his behaviour, including that he have no contact with any relatives of the bombing victims. He must live in a halfway house and undergo counselling, and he is forbidden from participating in political activities or associating with criminals, people with extremist views and anyone involved in politics.

Parole officers will have the right to send Reyat back behind bars at any point during the final third of his sentence if he violates those conditions or if officers are concerned about his risk to the community.

Former Surrey MLA Dave Hayer said he had a hard time believing that Reyat was being allowed out of prison while the other people responsible for the terrorist attack remain free. Hayer’s father, the journalist Tara Singh Hayer, had agreed to testify for the Crown in the Air India trial before his assassination in 1998.

“It’s amazing. It’s shocking to see that we will allow this person to walk free again,” Hayer said.

“I think we should have held him in jail until he was willing to tell who the other people were who were involved in that.”

Reyat had previously served two sentences for manslaughter — one in connection to the Air India bombing and a second at the Narita airport in Tokyo that killed two baggage handlers.

Both explosions were planned by a group of Sikh separatists in B.C. waging a campaign of terror against India’s government. They checked two suitcase bombs in at Vancouver International Airport on June 23, 1985 to be loaded onto flights headed in opposite directions.

blindsay@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/bethanylindsay

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