Bartleman never told RCMP of Air India threat: inspector

A former RCMP inspector told the Air India inquiry Monday that he was never approached by Ontario Lt. Gov. James Bartleman about a specific threat against Flight 182 in the days before it was blown out of the sky.
Lloyd Hickman was the ranking RCMP officer at a June 18, 1985, meeting about Sikh extremism that Bartleman said he interrupted with intelligence about a threat to Air India for the weekend of June 22-23.
Bartleman rocked the inquiry earlier this month when he said he was brushed off by the senior RCMP officer, whose name he could not recall, when he tried to raise the specific threat that day.
Bartleman, then in charge of intelligence for the External Affairs department, said the moment was seared in his mind because of the rudeness with which he was treated by the RCMP member.
But Hickman said he would have remembered an encounter like the one described by Bartleman and it just did not happen.
"I only seen or met Mr. Bartleman once," he told inquiry commissioner John Major. "Certainly if he had called me out of a meeting to talk to me, I would have remembered that."
Bartleman's testimony contradicted the official government position of years that there was no specific warning against Air India Flight 182 on the weekend it was bombed, killing all 329 aboard.
Hickman, who worked in VIP security at the time, said there was no specific warning against Air India that he was ever aware of.
And he said if any young RCMP inspector had treated Bartleman the way he described, he would have been talked to and possibly had a reprimand placed on his file.
28/05/07 Kim Bolan, CanWest News Service/National Post, Canada

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Categories: Air India May 2007, Foreign May 2007, Safety May 2007