Air India inquiry to hear story of purported Parmar confession

Ottawa: More than two decades after Air India Flight 182 was blown from the sky, a public inquiry is set to hear about a purported confession by the prime suspect in the 1985 bombing.
Talwinder Singh Parmar, head of the militant Sikh separatist group Babbar Khalsa, was arrested shortly after the attack, but the RCMP didn't have enough evidence to make any charges stick. He was freed and eventually slipped out of Canada.
There have been claims for years, however, that Parmar made a statement about the bombing - possibly under torture or possibly in an effort to shift some of the blame to others - before he was slain by Indian police in 1992.
The inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major is expected to start hearing evidence on the matter Monday, when two officials of the Punjab Human Rights Organization are scheduled to testify.
Their story was supposed to come out in June, when Sarabjit Singh, secretary general to the organization, and Rajvinder Singh Bains, the group's legal counsel, first journeyed to Ottawa. They were accompanied then by Harmail Singh Chandi, a former Punjab policeman said to be knowledgeable about Parmar's capture and interrogation.
The three men pulled out of the hearings and went home in June because Major couldn't give them an ironclad guarantee of anonymity. But the story leaked upon their return to India when the magazine Tehelka reported that Chandi had kept transcripts and tape recordings of the supposed confession.
Parmar was said to have confirmed he was involved in the downing of Flight 182 with the loss of 329 lives, as well as another bombing the same day that killed two baggage handlers at Narita airport in Japan.
But he was also said to have told his interrogators that the real mastermind of the plot was Lakhbir Singh Brar, a former head of the International Sikh Youth Federation who was deported from Canada as a security risk and is now believed to be living in Pakistan.
Critics in both Canada and India have questioned the claims about Brar and suggested they have more to do with internal Sikh politics than with reality. The RCMP is known to have investigated Brar in connection with the Air India bomb plot but never charged him while he was in Canada.
It's also known the Mounties have been aware for several years of the purported confession by Parmar. Members of his family say the RCMP informed them in 2002 that the force believed - contrary to official denials from Indian authorities - that he had been captured alive, interrogated and only then killed.
23/09/07 The Canadian Press

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Categories: Air India - International Sep 2007, Foreign Sep 2007, Safety Sep 2007