1985 Narita International Airport bombing

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1985 Narita International Airport bombing
Narita International Airport, Terminal 1. The main site where the bombings happened.
Location	Narita International Airport, Greater Tokyo Area, Narita, Chiba, Japan
Date	June 23, 1985 15:19 JST (UTC+9)
Target	Air India Flight 301
Weapons	Bombs
Deaths	2
Injured	4
Victims	Baggage handlers killed
Perpetrators	Inderjit Singh Reyat
Motive	Sikh Terrorism

The 1985 Narita International Airport bombing was the attempted terrorist bombing of Air India Flight 301, which took place on June 23, 1985. A bomb hidden in a suitcase transiting through Narita International Airport, then known as New Tokyo International Airport, exploded at 06:19 in a baggage handling room, killing two baggage handlers and injuring another four. The bomb exploded prematurely while the plane was still grounded. The attack at Narita was part of an attempted double-bombing orchestrated by Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Canadian national, and the Sikh terrorist organization, Babbar Khalsa. The bombs were made by Inderjit Singh Reyat.

The suitcase bomb had come from Vancouver, Canada through Canadian Pacific Flight 003 and was transiting through the airport for Air India Flight 301 to Bangkok, Thailand before continuing on to Delhi, India.

The initial plan was for the Air India Flight 301 bomb to explode at the same time as the one that had been planted aboard Air India Flight 182. However, Flight 182's bomb exploded over the Atlantic Ocean off the southwest tip of the coast of Ireland, just one hour after 301's bomb, due to the fact that the plan had failed to take into account that Japan did not observe daylight saving time. As a result the bomb at the Narita Airport exploded while 301 was still grounded, earlier than the perpetrators had planned. Had the plan worked the bomb would have exploded inside Air India Flight 301 instead of inside the airport.

Extensive analysis by the Japanese investigators identified bomb parts through serial numbers and narrowed the pieces to less than 2000 possible electronic tuners of an older model shipped to Vancouver, Canada, allowing Canadian police to identify a single person who had bought this older model recently. At the same time in the inquiry to the Air India Flight 182 bombing, investigators had identified that the man checked-in luggage without boarding the plane. Inderjit Singh Reyat, who lived in Duncan, British Columbia, was convicted in Canadian court. He was found guilty in 1991 in the Narita bombing. In 2003, shortly before the start of the Air India trial, he made a plea bargain on reduced charges and a promise of testimony against other suspects. He made the bombs used in both attacks.