Mountie cited specific threat to Air India days before bombing

Ottawa: An RCMP inspector warned just weeks before Air India Flight 182 blew up that the Mounties had received “specific intelligence” warranting protection of all the airline’s flights to and from Canada.
The information is just one nugget among many buried in thousands of heavily edited pages of material soon to be tabled with the inquiry into the June 1985 disaster, making it difficult to determine how the new facts fit into the confounding Air India puzzle.
The inquiry allowed journalists a brief look Monday at a sampling of 42 binders of letters, memos and reports spanning more than two decades. Many of the pages, including some entire documents, were censored by government officials.
An RCMP chronology of threat assessments prepared by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says several meetings were held from May 26 to 31, 1985, involving representatives of Air India, Transport Canada and the Mounties.
The meetings “did not convince Transport Canada that a serious threat existed” warranting RCMP involvement, the chronology says.
Insp. H. G. Clarke of the RCMP’s Protective Policing Branch, however, insisted that “specific intelligence was received by the RCMP which indicated that special security precautions should be taken on all Air India flights to and from Canada.”
The chronology suggests police were indeed provided weekly throughout June for the airline’s flights from Canada to India. But the efforts were not enough to prevent the worst terrorist act in Canadian history.
19/02/07 Jim Bronskill/The Canadian Press/Canada.com

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Categories: air india feb 2007, foreign feb 2007, safety feb 2007