April 29, 2004

VANCOUVER, April 29, 2004
(CP)

The bomb that downed Air India Flight 182 was almost five times the size of the one that blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the accused bombers' trial heard Thursday.

Aircraft explosion expert Prof. Christopher Peel told Justice Ian Josephson of the B.C. Supreme Court the explosion in a left aft baggage area ripped the plane to pieces.

Peel said significant cracks ran fore and aft of the explosion.

"The belly of the aircraft is effectively split open and starts to part like the sides of a clam shell,'' he said.

The internal structure would have come out via that large split and cracks running aft would have severed the tail, Peel said.

"The two major pieces of structure start to come off the forward-flying aircraft and then disintegrate subsequently as they fall to the sea.''

Data recorders recovered from the sea bed off the coast of Ireland indicate the plane was flying at an altitude of 9.5 kilometres just before the blast.

Three hundred and twenty nine people died in the bombing.

The Lockerbie bombing claimed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground.

Peel's evidence is critical to the Crown case.

Prosecutors contend the bomb was in cargo area 52 with luggage originating in Vancouver.

Defence lawyers for co-accused Ajaib Singh Bagri, however, say the device was in area 51, a scant few feet away.

Baggage in that area was loaded in Toronto.

The distance between the two areas could be the distance between a finding of guilt or innocence for Bagri.

The prosecution has presented evidence that bags from two men, both named Singh, were checked in at Vancouver International Airport.

It has also heard evidence that Bagri wanted to borrow a car to take some bags to Vancouver International Airport just before the bombing. He told a female friend, whose name is protected by court order, only the bags would be leaving.

If the court finds the bomb was in 51, the connection between Bagri and the bomb vanishes.

Peel, though, says the structural damage indicates the blast came from area 52.

"I must be looking for a bomb or device that is on this region,'' he said, drawing a star on area 52 on a diagram of the plane.

"A large portion of 51 is denied for the bomb,'' he said, adding the damage would have been further forward in the fuselage.

"It becomes to my mind impossible,'' he said of the defence theory.

The court moves Friday to a secret Vancouver warehouse where the remains of Flight 182 have been reconstructed.

Peel is part of a team that reconstructed the wreckage.

He was also involved in investigations into the Lockerbie disaster and into the crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island, N.Y., in 1996.

Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik are being tried on charges of conspiracy and murder in connection with the explosion that downed Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland June 23, 1985.

Malik and Bagri also face charges connected to an explosion at Tokyo's Narita airport the same day. Two baggage handlers died in that blast.

The Crown alleges the pair were part of a group of B.C.-based Sikh separatists who targeted the national airline of India to retaliate for the Indian Army's attack a year earlier on the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine