Relatives of the 329 people killed on Air India Flight 182 will gather from around the world in a Canadian court on Wednesday to learn the fate of two Sikh militants on trial for history's deadliest bombing of a civilian airliner.

Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri are charged with murder and conspiracy for what police allege was a plot by Vancouver-based Sikh separatists to simultaneously destroy two Air India jets in 1985 as revenge on the Indian government.

British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Ian Bruce Josephson, who is deciding the case without a jury, will issue his verdict on Wednesday after three months of deliberation. Arguments and witness testimony in the trial took 19 months.

Susheel Gupta said he and other relatives of the victims have waited nearly 20 years for what they hope will be a guilty verdict and a sense of closure. At least 70 of the relatives are expected at the hearing, some from as far away as India.

"It will be an important milestone," said Gupta, of Ottawa, who was a young boy when his mother died on Flight 182.

The mid-air explosion that ripped through the Boeing 747 off the Irish coast on June 23, 1985, was a bloody chapter in a religious war that has since faded from world attention. It pitted the Indian government against militants fighting for an independent Sikh homeland.

Prosecutors say the bombers wanted revenge for the Indian Army's 1984 storming of Sikhism's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in the city of Amritsar. The operation, aimed at ousting militants from the temple, left hundreds of people dead.

One bomb destroyed Flight 182 on its way from Canada to London and then India, killing everyone on the aircraft. The other bomb exploded in luggage being transferred at Tokyo's Narita Airport to Air India Flight 301, killing two workers and injuring four others.

Malik, 58, a wealthy Vancouver businessman, and Bagri, 55, a Kamloops, British Columbia, sawmill worker, were arrested in October 2000. Both are prominent members of the Sikh community in the western Canadian province, which has one of the largest Sikh populations outside India.

The defense acknowledged during the trial there may have been a conspiracy to destroy the aircraft, but they denied Bagri and Malik were part of it.

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 help make the bombs.

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.

Investigators say Malik, Bagri, Reyat, Parmar and several other men who have never been charged constructed the suitcase bombs and loaded them on a Canadian Pacific Airlines flights in Vancouver that connected with Air India. The luggage was checked in by men who never boarded the planes themselves.

The luggage transferred to Flight 182 was supposed to be screened for explosives in Toronto, but the equipment was malfunctioning.

Most of the passengers were families living in Canada but going to India to visit relatives. More than 60 of the victims were children younger than 11 years old. Many of the bodies were never recovered.

Much of the prosecution's case was based on circumstantial evidence, but there were two witnesses who said Malik and Bagri admitted their roles after the explosion.

One witness, who cannot be identified because of a court order to protect her identity, testified that Malik said: "'We had Air India crashed... Nobody, I mean nobody, can do anything. It's all for Sikhism'."

The defense said the prosecution witnesses were motived by personal revenge or for financial gain. They also questioned technical evidence on where the bomb was located on the plane, saying the device could not be traced to Vancouver.

The prosecution's case was made difficult by a decision by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in the late 1980s to destroy wiretaps it had made of the suspects before and after the bombings.

The spy agency had been watching Parmar and knew that he and Reyat had been testing explosives, but it did not have them under surveillance the day the bombs were allegedly taken to Vancouver Airport.