Thaindian News

Vancouver, Mar.9 (ANI): Royal Canadian Mounted Police Deputy commissioner Gary Bass has said RCMP investigators in the Air India case were not told that Canadian Security Intelligence Service had been wiretapping the phone conversations of Sikh fundamentalist leader Talwinder Singh Parmar.

CSIS agents had wiretapped Parmar’s phone conversations and kept him under surveillance for weeks before the blast.

They also followed Parmar into the woods and watched him test a homemade bomb three weeks before the blast.

Bass said that CSIS did not share the information with the RCMP at that time, as a result 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 Parmar was a target until October or November of 1985″, The Globe and Mail quoted him, as saying.

Bass’s comments shed new light on the Air India flight explosion case on June 23, 1985 that killed nearly 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 however it was unknown how much in the dark the RCMP really were.

Earlier, the federal inquiry into the investigation of the Air India bombing reports concluded that the RCMP was ill-prepared and poorly trained.

The inquiry pointed out that 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. (ANI)