1984 airline hijacking terrorist wants to be lawyer in Canada

Toronto, Sep. 28, 2009
S. Singh

Parminder Singh Saini, 46, has been fighting deportation from Canada since 1995, this month completed a "good character" hearing mandated by the Law Society of Upper Canada to determine whether he is eligible for a lawyer's licence. He says he is rehabilitated and admits his participation in a hijacking plot 25 years ago was morally and legally wrong.

“Over the course of the last 15 years, (Canadian) courts and tribunals have declared that he is a danger to the public and security in Canada and that he shouldn’t remain,” law society counsel Susan Heakes told a hearing this month on Saini’s licence application to practise law.

In 2006, he received law degree at the University of Windsor and BA from York University. On Jan. 21, 1995, he came to Canada as Balbir Singh carrying a fake Afghan passport, according to the Custom officer.

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His participation in a hijacking plot 25 years ago:

In early June 1984, the Indian Army invaded the most sacred of all Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple complex to flush out Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale a Sikh leader and his militant followers who had made the temple their refuge. This event marked a critical turning point for all Sikhs around the world as it made them realize that they could not take the existence of their religion for granted.

Parminder Singh Saini, who was just 21 that time, on July 5, 1984, he and four accomplices in the militant All India Sikh Students Federation boarded an Air India flight to Delhi from the northern city of Srinagar. After takeoff, he and another man stood up. They pushed aside a female attendant, walked to the front of the plane and Saini - in full view of passengers - raised a handgun to the head of a male attendant and fired, but did not hit him

At the cockpit door, Saini fired two or three more shots - risking the plane’s destruction, the court judgment said. One bullet pierced the door, striking the flight engineer in the back, not seriously. Other hijackers beat and stabbed two other crew members with kirpan daggers.

The door opened and Saini seized control of the plane. At gunpoint, he ordered the pilot to land in Lahore, Pakistan, and for the next 20 hours kept everybody hostage as he tried to negotiate a list of demands involving money and a large number of prisoners.

An attendant said, “They said that they were going to blow up the aircraft and we should say our last prayer”

All hijackers surrendered. A Pakistani judge said his goal was "to intimidate and terrorize the crew members and the passengers on board the aircraft and to cow them down."

He was sentenced for hang and later sentence to life in prison. After 10 years, he was released on the condition that he must leave the country.

The trial judge later wrote in a 184-page judgment, “but there is little doubt that the object of Parminder Singh (Saini).....was to intimidate and terrorize the crew members and the passengers.”

Parminder Singh Saini told the court for justify his actions,

• I was a disciple of (Sikh militant) Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed in the army action against the Golden Temple
• One month earlier, an Indian army raid against Sikh separatists amassing weapons in the temple had led to its desecration and the deaths of hundreds of people.......he hijacked the plane in protest.
• He blames youth and naïveté for his violent past and says he is rehabilitated.
• I had no legitimate right to do that,” he recently told the Law Society of Upper Canada of a 1984 airline hijacking. “It’s not legal"
• He deserves a second chance, he and his advocates say.

York University political science professor Sandra Whitworth, who taught him in 2001 said , “He served his time and was subsequently pardoned”

Saini's lawyer Frank Addario said, “The evidence of his character in the last 25 years- points toward a complete rehabilitation on his part.

He articled at Manji Singh Mangat’s Brampton law firm and Lorne Waldman’s Toronto immigration law firm, and keeps an office at Singh and Associates, his brother’s Mississauga immigration consultancy.

He said he had no criminal record and no family in Canada, then went to live with his mother and brother in Brampton. Eight months later, CSIS caught him and ordered him deported.

In 2000, the federal court agreed that the deportation order should be cancelled because his father obtained a pardon for him from Pakistan.

In 2001, the Federal Court of Appeal emphatically rejected the pardon and allowed the deportation order to stand.

“The victims of this (hijacking) are not limited to those persons unfortunate enough to be psychically affected, nor are the effects of the hijacking limited to one government,” the appeal judges wrote. “Hijacking terrorizes all nations and society as a whole.”

Similarly, Saini’s application to be cleared as a national security threat was at first accepted, then denied; he remains a certified danger to the public.

Saini said through his lawyer that he would be pleased to speak after the Law Society of Upper Canada releases its decision, according to local paper