Key RCMP investigators in the Air India case were not told for at least four months after the explosions that CSIS had been wiretapping the phone conversations of Sikh fundamentalist leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, says RCMP Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass.
In an interview days before his retirement from the RCMP, Deputy Commissioner Bass said some top RCMP investigators on the Air India task force were not aware of information that CSIS had on Mr. Parmar in the days after the bomb explosions.
CSIS agents had wiretapped Mr. Parmar's phone conversations and had him under surveillance for weeks before the blast. Also, they had followed Mr. Parmar into the woods and watched him test a homemade bomb three weeks before the blast.
But CSIS did not share their information or their analysis with the RCMP at that time, said Deputy Commissioner Bass, a former team commander of the task force. As a result, Mr. Parmar was not among the targets in the RCMP's initial submissions for wiretap authorizations. "We had people on the [investigative]team who did not know [Mr.]Parmar was a target until October or November of 1985," he said.
Deputy Commissioner Bass's comments shed new light on the tempestuous time after the twin bomb explosions on opposite sides of the world on June 23, 1985 that killed 331 people. For years after the bombings, CSIS has been in the spotlight for erasing wiretap tapes that could have incriminated suspects, and brought the terrorists to justice but it was not known how much in the dark the RCMP really were.
The federal inquiry into the investigation of the Air India bombing, in its report last year, concluded that the RCMP was ill-prepared and poorly trained. Its terrorist/extremist unit had limited knowledge of the players and no meaningful access to sources in the community. The RCMP ignored information about the suspects in their own files and did not involve Vancouver police, who were familiar with Sikh extremists in the city, the inquiry says.
Deputy Commissioner Bass flatly contradicted the inquiry's findings. Information that would have identified the suspects was not in RCMP files, he said. "It was at some point," he added, but not for many months after the bombing.
During the interview, Deputy Commissioner Bass, who was in charge of the Air India task force from 1995 to 2000, also spoke about some of the suspects.
Some are dead, such as Mr. Parmar and Hardial Singh Johal, he said. Police identified others of interest in India who are also dead, he said without elaborating.
Mr. Parmar, a Sikh fundamentalist leader fighting for an independent country in India called Khalistan, was arrested on Nov. 6, 1985 but was released without charges being laid. He told the media that police accused him of being the mastermind behind the Air India bombings.
He was arrested for a second time in Ontario in June, 1986, and charged with playing a role in a plot to blow up buildings in India. He was found not guilty the following year after Crown prosecutors refused to disclose information used in a wiretap application. He went into hiding in 1988 and was killed in India four years later.
The RCMP were in the dark about how Mr. Parmar died for several years after his death. Initially, police accepted the conclusion of an inquiry in India that Mr. Parmar had been killed in a shootout, Deputy Commissioner Bass said. They found out some time later that he had been captured and tortured, he said. RCMP did not discover until 1997 that Mr. Parmar allegedly made a confession before his death.
Deputy Commissioner Bass said the confession, which was obtained after torture, was unreliable. Also, the RCMP saw that India did not attach much significance to Mr. Parmar's statements. "India had put Air India behind them, that essentially was what we were told," he said.
Mr. Parmar identified a refugee in Canada, Lakhbir Singh Brar, as a central figure in the Air India plot. According to a copy of the confession provided to the federal inquiry, Mr. Parmar wrote that Mr. Brar was involved in the test blast in the woods with Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only person to be convicted for playing a role in the plot to blow up airplanes. A person called Manjit Singh, also known as Lal Singh, was involved in preparing the plan to blast two planes and booking ticket reservations for one of the flights, Mr. Parmar wrote.
Investigators decided that Mr. Brar was not involved in the Air India bombings, the Deputy Commissioner said. Mr. Brar, who came to Canada as a refugee two months before the 1985 bombing, was deported in the early 1990s after he was identified as a national security risk. Although surveillance showed him meeting with suspects in the Air India case and he was reported to be a terrorist, he was not interviewed by Air India investigators as a potential witness or a suspect until 2001.
However, Deputy Commissioner Bass was less certain about Lal Singh. "He has been interviewed many times over the years and there was never a definitive outcome to it," he said.
The Globe and Mail reported in 1985 that one of the tickets had been issued for Lal Singh. He was arrested in India in 1992 and, according to police in India, admitted complicity in the bombing. The RCMP interviewed Mr. Singh twice before Mr. Parmar's alleged confession was known and concluded that he was not one of the conspirators. They reached the same conclusion after a third interview following the release of Mr. Parmar's alleged confession.
Hardial Singh Johal, who died in 2002, had been arrested in 2000 but was released without charges being laid. A school janitor, he allegedly stored the bombs in a school basement before they were taken to the airport. He was seen at the airport on the day the luggage with bombs were checked in.
Deputy Commissioner Bass said police talked to him "very soon before he died." Mr. Johal did not give a statement to police. "He did not admit it," Deputy Commissioner Bass said.