Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Air India bombing: Grief pours out at inquiry

Ottawa: It took 20 years -- and a narrow escape from yet another potential tragedy -- for Jayashree Thampi to come to terms with the Air India bombing.
Thampi, who lost her husband Lakshmanan and seven-year-old daughter Preethi in the 1985 terrorist attack, recounted yesterday how the enormity of it all overwhelmed her.
"I closed my mind to the crash, I concentrated on my work at the Bank of Montreal," she told a public inquiry. "I pretended it did not happen to me. In all those years, I never cried for my daughter."
The tears didn't come until last August -- after Thampi had watched in horror at Toronto's Pearson Airport as an Air France plane carrying her son Vivek skidded off a runway and burst into flames.
This time the ending was a happy one, as Vivek emerged safely into his mother's embrace.
"Nobody understood why I was crying, because my son was safe," Thampi, speaking in trembling voice, told a hushed hearing room.
"They didn't know I wasn't crying for the son who made it, but for the daughter who didn't. For the first time in 20 years, I mourned the death of my daughter and cried for her."
Thampi is one of dozens of family members who have told -- or will tell -- their story to the inquiry, headed by former Supreme Court judge John Major, belatedly mandated by the Conservative government to investigate the June 1985 downing of Air India Flight 182 that took 329 lives.
"Air India was a preventable tragedy," said Thampi. "Why did the system fail?"
Susheel Gupta, who has grown up to become a federal Crown prosecutor in the years since his mother perished on Flight 182, also expressed hope that justice can yet be done.
"For 20 years, we asked for a public inquiry," noted Padmini Turlapati, a Toronto pediatrician who lost two sons on Flight 182.
27/09/06 Jim Brown/The Canadian Press/Hamilton Spectator, Canada
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