Lone Kanishka bombing convict walks free

The lone convict in the 1985 Air India Kanishka airliner bombing that killed 329 people, mostly of Indian origin, on Friday walked free on a whopping $500,000 bail after spending 20 years in Canadian jail.

Inderjit Singh Reyat, 55, was released at 0035 IST from the North Fraser Pretrial Centre in British Columbia Province, as a high-level public inquiry into the alleged botched handling of the tragedy released the lengthy submissions covering 18 months of hearings and testimonies.

Reyat was convicted for building the bombs that killed everyone onboard the Air India Flight 182 after it exploded off the Irish coast on June 23, 1985 and two baggage handlers at Narita International Airport in Tokyo on the same day.

His family reportedly posted a $500,000 surety for his bail after the Province's Court of Appeal granted him bail on Wednesday, pending trial in January on a perjury case connected to the Air India bombing case.

Reyat is accused of lying 27 times during his September 2003 testimony at the Air India trial in which two other suspects Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik were acquitted, sparking outargue among the victims' families.

The uproar prompted Prime Minister Stephen Harper to appoint a judicial inquiry on May 1, 2006 into the Air India tragedy headed by retired Supreme Court justice John Major which held its last public hearing in February.

It has now now posted nearly 1,600 pages of written submissions on its website because the federal government needed time to translate its submissions into Canada's two official languages English and French, according to a news release.