Vancouver: Key RCMP investigators in the Air India case were not told for at least four months after the explosions that CSIS had been wiretapping the phone conversations of Sikh fundamentalist leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, says RCMP Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass.
In an interview days before his retirement from the RCMP, Deputy Commissioner Bass said some top RCMP investigators on the Air India task force were not aware of information that CSIS had on Mr. Parmar in the days after the bomb explosions.
CSIS agents had wiretapped Mr. Parmar’s phone conversations and had him under surveillance for weeks before the blast. Also, they had followed Mr. Parmar into the woods and watched him test a homemade bomb three weeks before the blast.
But CSIS did not share their information or their analysis with the RCMP at that time, said Deputy Commissioner Bass, a former team commander of the task force. As a result, Mr. Parmar was not among the targets in the RCMP’s initial submissions for wiretap authorizations. “We had people on the [investigative] team who did not know [Mr.] Parmar was a target until October or November of 1985,” he said.
Deputy Commissioner Bass’s comments shed new light on the tempestuous time after the twin bomb explosions on opposite sides of the world on June 23, 1985 that killed 331 people. For years after the bombings, CSIS has been in the spotlight for erasing wiretap tapes that could have incriminated suspects, and brought the terrorists to justice but it was not known how much in the dark the RCMP really were.
08/03/11 Robert Matas/The Globe & Mail
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