GRIEVING family points to name of loved one carved in the granite wall. Vancouver Sun photo.
MEMORIAL for Air India crash victims with sundial and wall of their names.
It will be 36-years on June 23 when the devastating news flashed around the world.
We all learned that Air India Flight 182 was blown up in the sky during a trip from Toronto to London, then to Delhi, killing all 329 people on board.
The mass-killing still remains the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history.
The flight, with 268 Canadians on board, was blown up near the southwest tip of Ireland.
After much mourning, soul-searching and questions by grieving family members, a memorial for the victims killed in the bombing was erected in 2007 at Humber Bay Park East, which marked the 22nd anniversary of the tragedy.
For 14 years, mourners from the Indo Canadian community have been making the trek every June to the memorial, in a quiet area of the park, to pray for their loved ones.
The memorial is made up of a sundial, gardens and a granite inscription wall that bears the names of the 329 people who lost their lives while travelling on Flight 182. It also commemorates two baggage handlers killed by a bomb in a related attack at an airport in Japan.
Grieving families from across the country and elsewhere touch and hold on to the names of their loved ones carved forever in the stone.
“This is a place where all Canadians can come to pay their respects and remember those who were victims of terror,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on unveiling the memorial. “On that dark day, we got a shocking glimpse of what lurks at the core of some of our fellow human beings.”
That year the Government of Canada established three new memorials and refurbished another in Ottawa so that Canadians would never forget the tragedy. Memorials were dedicated to remember the victims of those living in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal.
The memorial in Humber Bay Park East, like the others, will forever stand as a reminder of the innocent lives lost during a very sad chapter in Canadian history.
In a few months, the mourners will return once more to pay tribute to their husbands, wives, children and other loved ones senselessly taken away from us on that day.
After a 15-year investigation into the largest mass murder in the country’s history, two British Columbia Sikh separatists were charged with murder and conspiracy in both attacks. They were acquitted in 2005. A third accused, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was convicted of manslaughter for his role in building the two bombs.