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Kanishka accused has no money for defence

Ajit Jain in Toronto

Inderjit Singh Reyat, one of the accused in the Air India bombing of June 1985 who is now in police custody in Vancouver, British Columbia, has no money to pay for his defence.

Reports say that even though three months have passed since Reyat's arrest, he has not yet seen the basis for the charges against him.

As an accused, Reyat is entitled to see the evidence against him before the trial begins. Prosecutors have reportedly refused to release the evidence because Reyat has no defence attorney to whom it can be released.

"Reyat has not officially retained counsel," Goeffrey Gaul, spokesman for the Air India prosecution team, is quoted as saying.

The other two accused, businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik and mill worker Ajaib Singh Bagri, were arrested last year in October. Both have been charged with mass murder in connection with the death of 329 passengers and crewmembers aboard Kanishka, the Air India flight that crashed over the Atlantic on June 23, 1985.

Malik, a wealthy person, has retained five lawyers and Bagri, just a mill worker, has surprisingly contracted six defence attorneys.

There's a provision for legal aid in British Columbia for people who lack financial resources to pay for their defence. It is, however, limited to a maximum of Can $50,000 on lawyers' fees for criminal cases.

This money is inadequate for the Air India trial, which is expected to last at least eight months.

According to a report in the Globe and Mail, a Canadian daily, Vancouver lawyer David Martin has applied to the provincial government for financing a team of lawyers for Reyat's defence.

The enormity of the evidence in the Air India case can be gauged from the fact that defence attorneys for Malik and Bagri have received 90 volumes of documents each and 25 CDs with as many as 500,000 pages of material.

The report in the daily reveals that the defence lawyers have also sought access to an additional 220,000 pages of documents and thousands of hours of conversations captured by police wiretaps over the past 16 years.

Much of the wiretap is in Punjabi and has yet to be translated into English. Around 1,000 witnesses are likely to testify in the case.

The hearing in the British Columbia supreme court is due to begin in February next year.

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