Recording may have been clue to Air India bombing

Vancouver: A secret recording of Sikh militants just days before the 1985 Air India bombing may have warned of a pending terror attack, a Canadian inquiry was told on Tuesday, but police could not agree about the usefulness of the evidence.
Local police investigating an unrelated case said they secretly recorded Sikh extremists in Vancouver on June 12, 1985, who promised there would be an unspecified event in "two weeks". Flight 182 exploded on June 23, 1985, off the coast of Ireland, killing 329 people.
The officer who recorded the comment was unaware that there had been threats to Air India, but passed the information along to Canada's national police and spy agencies before the attack, which remains history's deadliest bombing of an airliner.
"Once I heard of the explosion. That's the thought I had; that's what they meant," Don McLean of the Vancouver Police Department told an inquiry in Ottawa into Canada's handling of the Flight 182 investigation.
But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said its translators who reviewed the secretly recorded tape after the attack could not hear the comment made in the Punjabi language or determine who might have made it, according to documents presented to the hearing in Ottawa.
01/05/07 Allan Dowd/Reuters

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