Air India plane hijacker seeks nod to practice law in Canada

Parminder Singh Saini, a convicted Sikh terrorist who is fighting his deportation to India, has asked the Canadian law regulator to allow him practice saying he "deserves a second chance."

Saini, who led the group of five youths who hijacked an Air India flight from Srinagar to New Delhi on July 5, 1984 and took it to Lahore, said while appearing before the Law
Society of Upper Canada recently that he regretted his past.

"I had no legitimate right to do that," said 46-year-old Saini, who earned a BA from York University and a law degree at the University of Windsor. However, the critics still remain skeptical about him.

"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 opposing his application.

Apart from hijacking a plane and shooting at several of his 270-plus hostages, Saini lied his way into Canada, has never gained landed-immigrant status. He faces deportation and
remains a national security threat, Heakes said.

"How can you reconcile those decisions, as recent as July 2009, and find that he should be admitted to the bar?" she was quoted as saying by the Toronto Star.

Saini was given life imprisonment by a Pakistani court but later his sentence was commuted to 10 years and he was asked to leave the country. In 1995, he entered Canada on a fake Afghan passport on the name of Balbir Singh.