VANCOUVER/OTTAWA, 3 May 2007 — Canada failed to act on Air-India’s request for more security three weeks before the 1985 attack on Flight 182 that killed 329 people in history’s deadliest bombing of a civilian airliner, an inquiry heard on Tuesday.
The airline alerted police at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport of reports that Sikh militants planned to place a bomb on one of its international flights. But the warning was apparently not passed along to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which monitors extremist groups in Canada.
Police who asked CSIS if they should increase security for the airline in the weeks before the June 23, 1985, attack were told by the spy agency it was unaware of any specific threat, the hearing in Ottawa was told.
The information was in documents read to the government inquiry looking into the handling of the Flight 182 investigation. Critics say Canada missed opportunities to prevent the attack and then bungled the investigation so the bombers were never caught.
Inquiry lawyer Anil Kapoor said there was no evidence the warning from Air-India’s chief of security on June 1, 1985, was purposely not sent to CSIS. “The explanation as I understand it is oversight,” Kapoor said.
“Oversight is hard to accept when you look at the context. Oversight is not filling your dog’s dish with water,” Commissioner John Major responded.
Flight 182, en route from Canada to India via London, was blown up in midair off the Irish coast by a suitcase bomb, killing everyone on the Boeing 747.
The bombing was believed to have been organized by Sikh militants living in Canada who were waging a violent campaign for an independent Sikh homeland in India and wanted revenge for India’s 1984 storming of the Golden Temple.
Police say the bomb was put on a plane in Vancouver by someone who did not board the aircraft. It was transferred to an Air-India flight in Toronto, but not fully screened because the X-ray equipment was broken.
The inquiry also heard on Tuesday that Sikh militants in Vancouver may have talked about the attack in a secretly taped conversation before Flight 182 exploded, but police later could not agree about the usefulness of the evidence.
The Vancouver police officer who recorded the conversation as part of an unrelated investigation, and passed the information along to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police 11 days before the bombing, was unaware of threats to Air-India and assumed the targets were Indian diplomats in Canada. Don McLean told the inquiry commissioner about an exchange between two men he described as Sikh militants on June 12, 1985.
McLean quoted the first as saying: “No consul has been killed. No ambassador has been killed. What are you going to do? Nothing?” The reply, he said, was: “You will see something done in two weeks.”
McLean said he realized they were talking about Flight 182, “Once I heard of the explosion.” But the RCMP said its translators who reviewed the tape after the attack could not hear the comments made in the Punjabi language or determine who made them.
McLean was also unaware that another Vancouver police officer had been warned in October 1984 that Sikh militants planned to attack Air India. That officer told the inquiry on Monday that he gave the information to CSIS and the RCMP, but did not hear back.
Although details of the alleged bombing plot were published in the media within weeks of the 1985 attack, police did not file murder charges until late 2000, saying they had lacked enough evidence to prosecute the case.
Two men charged with murder, Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik, were found not guilty after a lengthy trial. A third suspect, Inderjit Singh Reyat, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge.
Neither of the people that McLean believed talked about the pending attack was charged in connection with the Air-India bombing.
