A key witness in the Air India trial has testified that one of the chief accused had confessed to the bombing of the Kanishka flight and had the blessing of his Sikh spiritual adviser in carrying out the plot.
The woman, who cannot be identified as she is in protective custody, also said that Ripudaman Singh Malik had confessed to her that Canadian Sikhs had sent money to Sikhs in London plotting the assassination of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Complete coverage of the Kanishka bombing | Kanishka witness still loves main accused
She testified that the accused told her that Bhai Jeewan Singh blessed the bombing plan of the Air India flight 182, which later crashed off the Irish Coast on June 23, 1985 killing all 331 people on board, media reports said.
The blessing came when Malik and others met with the holy man in Seattle, she told the court on Monday.
"We had Air India crash," Malik had told her. "If one child dies for Sikhism, so what? We had the Air India crashed. Nobody, I mean nobody can do anything. It is all for Sikhism," Malik had confessed to the woman, CBC News reported.
"He was very calm and very serious," she told the court.
She said when she heard Malik say this, she 'just broke down. I cried'.
On being asked by Crown prosecutor Joe Bellows whether Malik had told her about the assassination plot against Rajiv Gandhi, the key witness replied Malik had confessed that when
Sikhs in London were planning an attempt on Gandhi's life, the Satnam Trust, a local Sikh organisation in which Malik was involved, had 'donated money to the Sikh extremist group Babbar Khalsa'.
The woman said Malik also told her that the trust and another local agency collected money to donate to the families of the Sikh bodyguards who were eventually hanged for Indira Gandhi's assassination.
She testified that Malik had also told her about the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He had said that on the same day the assassins of Indira Gandhi were executed, they sent a message telling Inderjit Singh Reyat, another key accused in the Air India case, to 'keep up the good work', CBC News said.
Many of the conversations, the witness said were recorded in her red journal. She admitted to having destroyed many of the pages to protect Malik.
In a voice wavering with emotion she said she 'did it so that I wouldn't be sitting here. "I didn't want people to look at him in a bad way," she told the court.
In 1997, the key witness in the Air India trial said, she was shocked to discover that Malik was a suspect in the Kanishka bombing. She later found out from a friend that he was one of the five charged in the bombings.
"I said (to her), no way, you are wrong," the 43-year-old woman who is married to another man, recalled. "What was there that I could do to help the person I cared so, so much about? I just wanted to talk to Malik and make it all better for him."
She said, "It (the revelation) just blew me. I couldn't get up... it was the most upsetting moment."
The woman, who worked for a religious school run by Malik from 1992 to 1997 when the pair had a falling out, said she and Malik secretly loved each other and that he asked her to record what he told her.
He said 'remember it, record it' and that 'some day I will not be able to be close to you to say things and that there are things in the past that would come back and haunt him', she told the court.
She said she destroyed some of her diaries after she left the school in 1997 because she feared the information about Malik would become public. "The things we discussed would get both of us in trouble... people were calling me a spy... I was so scared," she said.
The key witness in the Air India claimed Malik discussed with her how plane tickets came to be purchased and picked up in Vancouver.
Malik had told her that a man named Dalijit Singh Sandhu, a former gurudwara president, picked up the tickets that would be used to load a bomb-laden suitcases onto planes to Vancouver that connected with Air India jets in Toronto and Tokyo, she told the court.
Malik, a Vancouver-based businessman and Kamloops mill worker Ajaib Singh Bagri face first-degree murder counts and other charges in the Air India bombing off the Irish coast and a separate explosion an hour earlier at Tokyo's Narita airport that killed two baggage handlers.
Both had sat behind bullet proof glass on Monday at the trial. Malik had looked at the floor as the woman, who claimed to have loved him, testified about what she had written in her diary.
A third defendent, Inderjit Singh Reyat, has pleaded guilty earlier in February to manslaughter charges and is currently serving a five-year sentence after completing 10-year sentence in the Narita airport bombing case.
The woman told the court that Malik would visit Reyat in prison.
"He said that he wanted Reyat to know that he... took care of his commitment and always remember that was regarded as a Sikh hero," she said.
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