Recording may have held clue to Air India bombing

By Allan Dowd

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A secret recording of Sikh militants just days before the 1985 Air India bombing may have warned of a pending terror attack, a Canadian inquiry was told on Tuesday, but police could not agree about the usefulness of the evidence.

Local police investigating an unrelated case said they secretly recorded Sikh extremists in Vancouver on June 12, 1985, who promised there would be an unspecified event in "two weeks". Flight 182 exploded on June 23, 1985, off the coast of Ireland, killing 329 people.

The officer who recorded the comment was unaware that there had been threats to Air India, but passed the information along to Canada's national police and spy agencies before the attack, which remains history's deadliest bombing of an airliner.

"Once I heard of the explosion. That's the thought I had; that's what they meant," Don McLean of the Vancouver Police Department told an inquiry in Ottawa into Canada's handling of the Flight 182 investigation.

But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said its translators who reviewed the secretly recorded tape after the attack could not hear the comment made in the Punjabi language or determine who might have made it, according to documents presented to the hearing in Ottawa.

Flight 182 was blown up by a suitcase bomb while on a flight from Canada to India via London, killing everyone on the Boeing 747.

The bombing was believed to have been organized by Sikh militants living in Canada who were waging a violent campaign for an independent Sikh homeland in India and wanted revenge for India's 1984 storming of the Golden Temple.

Critics of Canada's handling of the case say authorities missed opportunities to prevent the bombing, and then bungled the investigation so that those responsible were never charged or convicted.