PM Harper issues apology to relatives of Air India victims

After 25 years of avoiding the mirror of accountability, Canada has turned to face its failure to stop the Air India bombing, with a full and powerful apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
“This was evil, perpetrated by cowards, despicable, senseless and vicious,” Mr. Harper said Wednesday evening at a Toronto ceremony for relatives of the 329 people, most of them Canadians, whose plane was bombed out of the sky on June 23, 1985, killing all aboard. “I will make no attempt to make any sense of it.”
What Mr. Harper did was give long-awaited government acknowledgement that the bombing – the worst act of mass murder in the country’s history – was a preventable, wholly Canadian crime, badly mishandled by federal intelligence and police agencies.
The tragedy was made worse, the Prime Minister said, when “the families were for years after treated with scant respect or consideration” by Canadian authorities.
“I stand before you, therefore, to offer on behalf of the Government of Canada, and all Canadians, an apology,” he said.
The Prime Minister was accompanied at the Toronto ceremony by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. The event was held around an Air India monument in a city park on the shores of Lake Ontario. Similar events were held Wednesday in Vancouver, Ottawa and in Ireland, where families travelled after the plane exploded off the Irish coast.
23/06/10 Anthony Reinhart/Globe & Mail

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Categories: Air India - International Jun 2010, Foreign Jun 2010, NACIL Jun 2010, Safety Jun 2010