Inquiry told erasure of tapes ‘incomprehensible and indefensible’

Vancouver: A former Crown prosecutor says Canada’s spy agency was neither “co-operative” nor “forthright” when he was working with the RCMP on the Air India bombing case.
James Jardine told the Air India inquiry Tuesday that he was frustrated for months by the reluctance of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to provide intelligence it had gathered on the key suspects in the terrorist plot.
Jardine also told Commissioner John Major that he learned definitively that CSIS had erased critical tapes made of suspect Talwinder Singh Parmar’s telephone calls when the agency’s director appeared on CBC in December 1987.
He wrote a brief note at the time expressing his disbelief.
“In the brashness of the moment, I wrote: ‘inconceivable, incomprehensible, indefensible incompetence,” Jardine testified.
Inquiry counsel Mark Freiman took Jardine, who is a Surrey provincial court judge, through years of documents showing repeated requests by the RCMP and Jardine’s prosecution team to get details of surveillance and wiretap evidence that would have been helpful in their efforts to build a criminal case against Parmar, Inderjit Singh Reyat and other suspects in both the Air India bombing and same day blast at Tokyo’s Narita Airport.
Jardine was assisting the Air India Task Force beginning in July 1985 and felt that there must be wiretaps because he knew that CSIS had surveillance on Parmar.
He told RCMP investigators, with whom he said he had a great relationship, that “if there are watchers, there will likely be wires.’”
“I certainly made it clear what I required” to mount a successful prosecution, Jardine said.
So the RCMP set out on a frustrating quest to get CSIS to hand over tapes and get access to surveillance material.
They only learned later that CSIS had decided there was nothing of evidentiary value on the tapes and routinely erased them without investigators or Jardine ever getting a chance to review them.
18/09/07 Kim Bolan, CanWest News Service/Canada.com

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

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