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CBC News - Canada - You won't want to read this
- The ugly story of the Air India bombing inches towards publication
- Terry Milewski CBC News
- Retired Supreme Court justice John C. Major, commissioner of the Air India inquiry. (Canadian Press)
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Nobody will blame you if you want to look away when John C. Major's epic report on the Air India bombing arrives — 25 years late! — on June 17.
Five volumes with 3,200 pages! Four extra volumes of academic reports for an extra 1,200 pages!
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It was the worst mass murder in Canadian history — 331 innocent civilians were slaughtered in one morning by two bombs made in British Columbia by Sikh extremists fighting India for an independent state. The group was led by an immigrant preacher in B.C. named Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Canadian citizen wanted for the murder of two policemen in India. Canada had refused to extradite him.
Parmar eventually returned on his own to India, where he was killed by police in 1992. He is revered by his Canadian admirers, even today, as a martyr of the Sikh nation.
- Dr. Padmini Turlapati at the 20th Air India memorial in Ahakista, Ireland, on June 23, 2005. She lost both her sons in the bombing. (CBC)
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How on earth had the plot succeeded when the police and CSIS were watching and wiretapping? Why were their tapes of Parmar's conversations mysteriously erased after the bombing, when CSIS knew that Parmar was the main suspect? Why were the warnings of an attack ignored?
Later, as he soldiered on through 200 witnesses and 17,000 classified documents, Major seemed mindful of the families' sense that they'd been cheated twice — first, by Canada's failure to prevent the bombing and, second, by its failure to give them justice or even answers.
- First, Major will tackle the failure to stop the plotters before the bombing. How could the authorities watch Parmar night and day, and not step in? How could an unaccompanied bag, checked in at Vancouver by a man who paid cash and never took his seat, have been loaded onto his connecting Air India flight in Toronto? The flight was so obviously threatened that the RCMP parked cars around the plane while the orphaned bag rolled up the conveyor belt and into the hold.
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Then, in the second half of volume two, Major will tackle the "post-bombing phase" — the meandering investigation which failed to bring the bombers to justice. Was it incompetence? Bad luck? Death threats against witnesses? A refusal by CSIS to co-operate with the RCMP?
All of these are in play. After all, a CSIS officer named Ray Kobzey, who'd been watching Parmar, exclaimed at the moment he learned of the bombing, "Parmar did it!" If they knew so much, why didn't they do something?
CSIS agents even followed Parmar and his bomb maker, Inderjit Singh Reyat, to a test blast in the woods on Vancouver Island, three weeks before the real thing. But, to this day, Reyat remains the only man ever convicted in the Air India bombing. (He is now charged with perjuring himself at the trial of the two men acquitted in 2005.)
- Publisher Tara Singh Hayer, who denounced the Air India bombers in his newspaper and told the RCMP he overheard one of them confess. Shot once and paralyzed from the waist down in 1988, he was shot fatally in 1998.
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Rather, the nation seemed to have disowned the disaster as someone else's problem.
"Canada and Canadians in general," Major said in his preliminary report, "did not immediately recognize this as a terrorist attack upon Canadians."
Now, he plans to set that straight, even if it's very late in the day. Some of the bereaved have not lived to see this June 23, the 25th anniversary of the bombing.
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