Police failures resulted in Air India disaster: inquiry

The inability of police to uncover the Air India bombing plot before the loss of 331 lives is "the biggest and most disastrous civil intelligence failure that Canada has faced," former RCMP deputy commissioner Henry Jensen said Monday.
Testifying at the Ottawa inquiry into the deadly terrorist bombings, Jensen admitted that someone should have been able to put all the pieces together before B.C. Sikh militants placed bombs aboard aircraft out of Vancouver in June 1985.
"I firmly believe that," Jensen told inquiry head John Major.
"I for one feel that somehow somewhere there were some dots that could have been linked and should have been linked and had [that] been done, then who knows, it might have been prevented."
Jensen, who now chairs the Ottawa police services board, emotionally recounted events 22 years ago when he first got word of the terrorist bombs.
The inquiry has heard weeks of evidence on the spotty information sharing between CSIS and the RCMP in the early months and the fact that there were personally clashes, turf wars and confusion over the new role of each.
Jensen pointed to politicians and government officials at the time who rushed the process to implement the CSIS Act for political reasons and because of a looming election.
18/06/07 Kim Bolan, CanWest News Service/National Post, Canada

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

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