Could have prevented Air India explosion: police bomb-checker

A former police officer says he believes he could have found explosives on Flight 182, but the plane had already left a Montreal airport by the time he arrived to check it, the Air India inquiry heard Wednesday.
Serge Carignan — a former dog handler with Quebec's provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec — told the inquiry in Ottawa that he was called to Mirabel airport on June 22, 1985, hours before a bomb blew the flight out of the sky and killed 329 people.
Carignan said he was told officials needed help searching a plane and luggage, and that the airport's regular RCMP explosives dog was out of the region on that date. By the time Carignan arrived at the airport roughly 45 minutes later, the plane had already taken off, he told the inquiry.
Carignan said he didn't know why the plane departed before he got to the airport.
"I've always wondered why, if I was called to search an airplane and some luggage … why did they let the airplane go before I arrived there," said Carignan.
"I did not have a chance to search that airplane. I believe that if I had a chance to search it, things might have turned out differently," he said. "I believe we would have found … the explosives."
Carignan discounted official reports from the RCMP and Transport Canada that were provided during Bob Rae's earlier probe into the disaster. The reports said bomb-sniffing dogs checked Air India flights before they left Toronto and Montreal.
09/05/07 CBC - The Hour, Canada

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