Shocked families of the 329 victims of the bombing called the ruling devastating and urged the Canadian government to establish a public inquiry into the crime and how it was investigated.

British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Ian Bruce Josephson found Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri not guilty of murder and conspiracy in connection with the bombing over the Atlantic as well as a related explosion at Tokyo’s Narita airport that killed two people.

The victims’ relatives wept in court as the judge read the verdicts following a 19-month trial. Malik, 58, and Bagri, 55, smiled at their families as the hearing ended.

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” one of the victim’s relatives cried to herself. The defendants’ families smiled and hugged each other outside the court.

“I want to repeat publicly today what I have told the authorities numerous times since 1985, that I had absolutely no involvement in any of these criminal activities,” Bagri said in a statement read outside the court by his daughter, Inderdeep Kaur Bagri.

Malik left the courthouse without commenting, but his family released a statement that expressed sympathy for the victims’ relatives but said their anger should be directed at police and prosecutors.

Josephson, who heard 115 witnesses in one of the most complicated and costly cases in Canadian history, called the bombing “fanaticism at its basest and most inhumane level” and agreed the devices that exploded off the Irish coast and in Japan probably originated in Vancouver.

But he said he could not believe key prosecution witnesses who testified Malik, a wealthy Vancouver businessman, and Bagri, a Kamloops, British Columbia, sawmill worker and Sikh priest, had admitted their roles in the plot.

The judge ruled justice would not be served if there was any doubt of the defendants’ guilt.

More than 70 relatives of the bombing victims came from around the world to hear the verdict, delivered in a specially built C$7.4 million ($6.2 million) high-security court.

“Today, 20 years on, we have lost our families all over again to the Canadian justice system,” said Sanjay Lazar, who had come to Vancouver from India.

Bombing said motivated by revenge

Prosecutors accused the two Indian-born Sikh separatists of seeking revenge for the Indian army’s 1984 storming of Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. That operation, aimed at ousting militants in the temple, left hundreds of people dead.

The two men were charged with planning to destroy two aircraft simultaneously. One bomb struck Flight 182 while it was on its way from Canada to India, via London, on June 23, 1985. The other exploded 54 minutes earlier in baggage being transferred to Air India Flight 301.

Malik and Bagri were arrested in October 2000.

The defense acknowledged in the trial there may have been a conspiracy, but denied Bagri and Malik were part of it.

A spokesman for the prosecution said it had not decided whether to appeal. Prosecutors have 30 days to make a decision.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman Sgt. John Ward said, “We are very disappointed today, but our disappointment does not get in the way of our investigation.”

The case was made difficult by problems in the long investigation, including the erasure of wiretaps of the suspects in the weeks before and after the explosions.

Malik and Bagri were originally scheduled to be tried with Inderjit Singh Reyat, but he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge before the trial began. Reyat was called as a witness, but denied knowing who asked him to assist with the bombs.

The judge referred to Reyat as “an unmitigated liar,” whose testimony “bordered on the absurd.”

Police say the mastermind of the plot was Talwinder Singh Parmar, a founder of the Sikh militant group Babbar Khalsa, who was killed by Indian police in October 1992.