Special Report: Air India Flight 182 (Page- 7)

As the weeks of July passed the police evidence began to mount. An examination of passenger lists and computer records indicated that a traveller by the name of L. Singh had checked in at Vancouver but had failed to board CP Air's Flight 003 to Tokyo's Narita Airport. L. Singh was also booked on Air India Flight 301 from Narita to Bangkok. Another passenger, M. Singh, had also checked in at Vancouver for CP Air's Flight 060 to Toronto, and he had failed to turn up as well. In both instances their bags had been loaded. M. Singh had not been confirmed on Flight 182 because of overbooking at the time of reserving his seat, but he was wait-listed for the trip. It was not permitted to check straight through, or interline piece of luggage onto a flight for which a passenger was (only wait-listed, so what had become of M. Singh and his bag? And where had L. Singh gone? The Canadian investigation also began to unravel a confusing sequence of bookings which had been made in the name of various Singhs, including one A. Singh, in the days leading up to the tragedy. The situation was proving to he suspicious, to say the least. The vast majority of the Sikhs in Vancouver were hard working, law abiding citizens, but the plot to assassinate Rajiv Ghandi in the US indicated that extremist elements did exist in such communities. In fact, two of the names used in booking flights matched the names of the two Sikhs wanted by the FBI. It was doubtful if those implicated in the scheme to kill Gandhi were connected with events in Vancouver, but the names in which flights were booked seemed to have been deliberately chosen to advertise the fact that a Sikh terrorist group was involved. If Flight 182 had been downed by a bomb, the motives for sabotage were becoming clear. Yet one strange fact confused the inquiry: no Sikh extremist organisation claimed responsibility. On that front there was total silence.

Other causes of the demise of Flight 182 had also to be considered and examined. If results were not forthcoming from the various investigations the answer could still lie at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Problems with the 'fifth pod' were dismissed with the preliminary inquiry, but one other obvious source of the tragedy, almost too shocking to contemplate with over 600+ 747s flying the skies of the globe daily, could be some kind of catastrophic structural failure. If such an event had occurred, other 747s throughout the world could be at serious risk.