Air India inquiry faces delay until February

Ottawa: A belated inquiry into the 1985 Air India bombing is facing an unexpected delay as lawyers sift through two decades of documents and figure out how much of the 21-year-old paper trail must remain secret for national security reasons.
Commission counsel Mark Freiman, who disclosed the problem at a hearing Monday, said seven weeks of testimony that had been scheduled for late November, early December and January will have to be postponed.
Freiman said he still hopes the inquiry can wrap up hearings by next spring -- a timetable that would allow former Supreme Court judge John Major to meet his original target of September 2007 for writing and delivering a report.
A similar inquiry into the Maher Arar affair ended up taking more than two years, largely because of difficulties in sorting out government claims of national security and deciding how much of the final report could be made public. Freiman said he's been working with federal lawyers in an effort to avoid such delays in the Air India probe.

06/11/06 Associated Press/CTV.ca, Canada

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