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Victims of Air India bombing remembered at dignified 40th anniversary ceremony in Cork
Relatives of the 329 people killed in the Air
India
bombing gathered in west Cork on Monday morning to mark the 40th anniversary of the atrocity.
Some 60 family members of the 329 people killed aboard Air India Flight 182 joined about 200 others at the memorial garden to their loved ones in Ahakista on the Sheep's Head peninsula for the simple, dignified service at the wall bearing their names and images.
There were no survivors from among the 307 passengers and 22 crew when a bomb, placed by Sikh extremists, exploded on-board the Boeing 747-237B, named Kanishka, en route from Montreal to New Delhi, some 160km off the southwest coast of Ireland at 8.13am on June 23rd, 1985.
The dead were remembered with a minute's silence at that exact time on Monday amid the cries of oystercatchers over the garden on the rocky grass-topped headland that has become a place of pilgrimage for relatives.
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Dr Padmini Turlapati lost her sons Sanjay (14) and Deepak (11) while Pradeep Kelsi lost his sister Indira (18) in the atrocity, and both spoke with real warmth and gratitude to the people of Ahakista and west Cork for the kindness that they have been shown the last four decades.
Taoiseach
Micheál Martin
said it was always an honour to attend the sombre commemoration and to witness the dignity, dedication and care with which the bereaved remembered their loved ones who died so tragically.
'Some 329 innocent people lost their lives over the skies of Ireland that morning, and the passing of time does not dim the scale of the tragedy. We feel the tragic scale of the loss when we see the faces and read the stories on the memorial here before us,' he said.
'Especially moving are the simple descriptions, 'Student' or 'Child' – so many young lives taken far too soon,' said Mr Martin as he also remembered the 270 people who died in the more recent
Air India Flight 171 disaster
in Ahmedabad in India
Indian minister Hardeep Singh Puri urged peoples and governments to unite to ensure there would be no repeat of the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which was one of 'deadliest attacks in aviation history and it has left scars that have not healed even after 40 years'.
Canadian
minister Gary Anandasangaree said he remembered hearing the news of the atrocity as a 13-year-old boy going to work for the summer in Gerrard Street in Toronto where everyone from the Indian subcontinent, regardless of faith, was in a state of shock and sadness.
Mr Martin, Mr Singh Puri and Mr Anadasangaree all laid wreaths as did Mayor of Cork Joe Carroll, asst commissioner David Teboul of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, asst Garda commissioner Eileen Foster and retired Capt James Robinson of the Naval Service, among others.
Bob Rae, the Canadian permanent representative at the UN, who wrote a landmark report on the atrocity, urged people to fight hate and concluded by quoting the words on the Ahakista Memorial and four similar memorials in Canada: 'Time flies, suns rise, and shadows fall – let it pass by – love reigns forever over all.'
