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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Kanishka_Rajiv_Gandhi_had_questioned_security_lapses/articleshow/1994732.cms

Kanishka: Rajiv Gandhi had questioned security lapses

[3 May, 2007 l 0935 hrs IST PTI]

TORONTO: In a phone call just after the bombing of the Air India plane in 1985, the then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had asked his Canadian counterpart Brian Mulroney why all the baggage on the flight was not removed and re-checked in Montreal when three pieces were found to be suspicious.

Gandhi, a trained commercial pilot himself, had suggested to the Canadian PM
that Canada had breachedinternational procedures by not re-screening
the entire luggage on Flight 182.

Details of the emotionally charged exchange were revealed on Wednesday in declassified government documents released at the judicial inquiry probing the June 23, 1985 bombing that killed 329 people. A blast on the same day at Tokyo’s Narita Airport killed two.

A June 27 briefing document about the call says: “Overall impression was that Gandhi was highly excited, perturbed and concerned, but highly appreciative of the call.”

“After our PM related his sympathies and condolences, Gandhi said he understood three suitcases had been pulled from Air India flight in Montreal and his understanding was that when such a thing happened, it was standard [international] practice that all suitcases would be searched, but this had not been done in this case,” the document says.

“Our PM did not comment directly on this but went on to say that in response to Indian requests, we had made every effort to ensure safety of Indian diplomatic personnel and premises in Canada. We would redouble our protective efforts and prosecute to the full extent of the law anyone involved in illegal action,” National Post reported, quoting the documents.

The briefing note says Gandhi had already heard of the Narita bombing as well and the two prime ministers agreed it looked like there was a sinister connection.

The fact Mulroney first called Gandhi to express condolences on the loss of life on the plane when most of the passengers were Canadians has long been criticised.

But the intimate details of the conversation between the two former prime ministers sheds much more light on the response to what at the time was an unprecedented act of terrorism.

The briefing says that while Gandhi, a trained commercial pilot, was not directly questioning Canadian security measures before the bombing, “it is clear this question is implied.”

The document says Mulroney asked the staff to investigate Gandhi’s concerns about the baggage.

“Mulroney has asked Canadian authorities for a full report and we will relay that to Indian authorities,” says the memo, which was signed by an Ottawa official with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Another memo released at the inquiry describes a meeting on June 25, 1985 between Bartleman’s minister, Joe Clark, and S J S Chhatwal, the then Indian High Commissioner in Canada, about the bombing.

At the meeting, Clark said “he had for some time been very concerned about some activities within the Indian ethnic community in Canada involving extremist elements,” the document says.

“Clark said that he had personally talked with the President of India about this issue at the time of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s funeral and had stressed the importance of counteracting extremism.”

Talwinder Singh Parmar was a leader of Babbar Khalsa, an organization so deeply infiltrated by the Indian government that it was effectively under its control. (Remember, India Today reported that it was the Indian government itself that created the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.)

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/05/23/4202844-cp.html

CSIS wondered if Parmar was an Indian agent
By JIM BROWN

OTTAWA (CP) - Canada’s spy agency thought Talwinder Singh Parmar was probably a dangerous terrorist months before the 1985 Air India bombing - but it also toyed with an alternative theory that he could have been an agent provocateur working for the Indian government.

“He was an unknown (at the time),” Ray Kobzey, a former CSIS officer, testified Wednesday. “We needed to clarify what exactly we were dealing with here.”

Documents previously tabled at the inquiry headed by retired judge John Major show the Canadian Security Intelligence Service started trying in the fall of 1984 to get a wiretap warrant against Parmar, then head of the militant Babar Khalsa movement that preached armed struggle to win a homeland for Sikhs in northern India.

In support of the warrant application, CSIS pointed to inflammatory public speeches Parmar had made, threatening to kill “50,000 Hindus” and appealing to Sikhs to unite in the battle for independence.

Kobzey wrote at the time that Parmar should be considered “the most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country.”

But he also noted, in the material marshalled to support the wiretap warrant, that some sources in the Indo-Canadian community thought he was actually an agent of the Indian government intent on sowing discord.

That wasn’t as troubling as the possibility that he was plotting terrorist acts, Kobzey testified. But it was still a threat to Canadian national security.,

If Parmar had been an agent provocateur, he said, the danger would have been that he was “destabilizing the emigre community, creating problems within the community, fomenting unrest.”

The suggestion that Parmar was an agent of Indian intelligence, with a hidden agenda to discredit Sikhs, has long since been abandoned by virtually all students of the Air India bombing.

But the evidence at the inquiry shows CSIS hadn’t yet discarded the possibility when it began trying to get judicial authorization to tap his phone.

It turned out that it took five months to get the tap in place - not because of any resistance by the courts but because of bureaucratic problems within the security service.

The delay - previously noted by several witnesses - meant CSIS didn’t get the pipeline it wanted into Parmar’s activities until February 1985, four months before Air India Flight 182 was downed by a terrorist bomb.

It’s been an open question ever since whether speedier action to obtain the wiretap could have averted the tragedy.

Major observed Wednesday that there’s no way of knowing, but it could have given CSIS “a better chance of finding out at least what the gossip in that community was.

“Exactly” replied Kobzey. “It’s something that I’ve reflected on numerous times - the loss of that data, what did that mean in terms of the investigation and where it could have gone.”

Parmar, believed to have been the ringleader behind the bombing, left Canada after the attack and was never prosecuted. He was shot dead by police in India in 1992.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Kanishka_probe_Parmar_was_suspected_as_an_Indian_agent/articleshow/2071277.cms

Kanishka probe: Parmar was suspected as an Indian agent
24 May, 2007 l 1222 hrs ISTlPTI

TORONTO: Months before the 1985 Air India bombing, Canada’s spy agency thought Talwinder Singh Parmar was probably a dangerous terrorist but it also toyed with an alternative theory that he could have been an agent provocateur working for the Indian government.

“He (Parmar was an unknown (at the time),” Ray Kobzey, a former CSIS officer, testified on Wednesday.

Parmar later emerged as the key figure in the bombing of the Kanishka flight on June 23, 1985, which killed 329 people.

Documents previously tabled at the inquiry headed by retired judge John Major show the Canadian Security Intelligence Service started trying in the fall of 1984 to get a wiretap warrant against Parmar, then head of the militant Babar Khalsa movement that preached armed struggle to win a homeland for Sikhs.

In support of the warrant application, CSIS pointed to inflammatory public speeches Parmar had made, threatening to kill “50,000 Hindus” and appealing to Sikhs to unite in the battle for independence. Kobzey wrote at the time that Parmar should be considered “the most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country.”

BTW, Rediff is an Indian -based news service which supports the government line as against the human-rights activists and others who criticize their treatment of minorities. It always justifies any atrocity committed by the Indian regime.