RCMP dogs on training course when Air India bombed

Ottawa: No bomb-sniffing dog was on duty in Toronto on the weekend of the 1985 Air India bombing because the RCMP had sent every such canine it had on a training course, a public inquiry has heard.
That left the baggage loaded on to ill-fated Flight 182 to be screened by an electronic detector that had failed a test six months earlier.
Gary Carlson, the former RCMP dog handler at Toronto’s Pearson airport, testified Tuesday that he told Air India, following the January test, that the hand-held device known as a PD-4 wasn’t good enough.
He also told the airline that he and his dog Thor would be available any time they were needed to check suspicious luggage.
But Carlson and Thor were in Vancouver for a week-long training session on June 22, 1985, when the terrorist bomb planted in the baggage of Flight 182 went undetected and 329 people died.
“All the bomb dogs from across the country were there,” Carlson told the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major.
“At that time we only had five or six dogs in the whole country that were trained for explosives.”
There was no backup dog at Pearson because, in those days, other police forces in the Toronto to area didn’t have canine teams capable of explosives work.
The standard procedure, in the absence of a dog, would have been to hand search any baggage that was considered suspect, Carlson testified.
It’s known, however, that there were no hand searches that weekend at Pearson. In addition, an X-ray machine broke down and Burns Security, the firm hired by Air India to screen its baggage, had to resort to the electronic sniffer that had failed its initial trial at the start of the year.
Carlson said the hand-held PD-4 could not detect gunpowder at any distance greater than one inch from a test cache of the substance. It failed to register anything at all, no matter what the distance, when tested on plastic explosives.
15/05/07 Jim Brown/The Canadian Press/Canada.com, Canada

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