Narita airport bombing, June 1985

Who: Two Japanese baggage handlers, Hideharu Koda and Hideo Asano, were killed and four others injured. Inderjit Singh Reyat was convicted over the bomb. Canadian courts and inquiries tied it to the same conspiracy as the bomb that destroyed Air India Flight 182.

What: On the morning of 22 June 1985 two suitcases were checked in at Vancouver without any passenger boarding the flights. The tickets had been bought for cash on 20 June by a man who gave no name, and their names were changed to L. Singh and M. Singh (R v Malik and Bagri, 2005). The L. Singh bag went on Canadian Pacific Flight 003 to Narita, connecting to Air India Flight 301 for Bangkok; the M. Singh bag went by way of Toronto onto Flight 182. Flight 003 reached Narita at 10:47 p.m. Pacific time. While handlers were unloading the connecting bags, a bomb exploded inside one near the opening of a container at about 11:15 p.m., which was 23 June in Japan and 54 minutes before air traffic control lost contact with Flight 182.

Japanese police sealed the site and recovered over 3,200 pieces of debris. The bomb had been housed in a Sanyo FMT 611K stereo tuner. On 10 May 1991 a British Columbia court convicted Reyat of two counts of manslaughter for the two deaths and five explosives offences, finding that the tuner could be traced directly to him; the convictions were upheld on appeal in 1993. Bob Rae's 2005 report says he was arrested in Britain in February 1988, extradited to Canada in December 1989 and sentenced to 10 years. It also records Justice Josephson's conclusion that the conspiracy involved members of the Babbar Khalsa movement and that one of its leaders was Talwinder Singh Parmar, whom Indian police killed on 14 October 1992.

Where: The baggage area at Narita airport near Tokyo, with the bags checked in at Vancouver.

Why it mattered: It was one of two linked bombings of 22 to 23 June 1985; Rae's report speaks of the murder of 331 people, the 329 aboard Flight 182 and the two handlers. The Narita bomb went off on the ground, and Japanese police evidence about the tuner that housed it led to Reyat's conviction.