RCMP Watch

Canadian Press

The prime suspect in the 1985 Air India bombing admitted to a role in the attack years later under questioning by Indian police, a public inquiry has been told.

But Talwinder Singh Parmar, head of the militant Sikh separatist group Babbar Khalsa, reportedly insisted, during his 1992 interrogation, that he was a minor player and that others took the lead in hatching the plot that cost 329 lives.

The claims, contained in a summary of the affair presented Monday by the Punjab Human Rights Organization, were taken with a grain of salt by former Supreme Court justice John Major, the head of the inquiry.

He noted that although he was allowing the material to be entered in evidence he wasn’t making any call at this point on how credible it might be.

“It’s a document that forms part of this record,” said Mr. Major. “It may be true, it may not be true.”

Mark Freiman, chief counsel for the inquiry, also cautioned against drawing any “hasty conclusions,” while the RCMP maintained there was little it hadn’t already seen in its long-running effort to bring the bombers to justice.

Inspector Lorne Schwartz testified the Mounties first became aware of the supposed Parmar confession in 1997 and spent years pursuing the leads it provided — even though they suspected that anything Mr. Parmar had told police in the Punjab was extracted under torture.

“There may be a distastefulness about how purported information was received from an individual, if it was by torture or some (other) means,” said Insp. Schwartz. “However, the role of the investigator is to take the information and try to work with it.”

Mr. Parmar was arrested in British Columbia shortly after the bombing but was never convicted for the downing of Air India Flight 182. He slipped out of Canada several years later.

Indian authorities maintained he was killed in a shootout with police in 1992, but there have been claims for years that he was captured alive and questioned, then put to death in what amounted to an extra-judicial execution.

In what was said to be a police summary of his interrogation, he claimed the Air India bomb plot wasn’t his idea and he wasn’t enthusiastic about it when it was proposed by others.

Nevertheless, he went along and “agreed to arrange (for) the dynamite sticks,” Mr. Parmar was quoted as saying in the written material tabled Monday.

He attempted to shift much of the blame to Lakhbir Singh Brar, a former head of the International Sikh Youth Federation, and Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only person ever convicted in a Canadian court.

Two other Parmar associates, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, were acquitted at trial in Vancouver two years ago, a verdict that outraged the families of the bombing victims.

In the purported 1992 confession, Mr. Brar was identified as the mysterious “Mr. X” — as he was then known to Canadian investigators — who accompanied Mr. Parmar and Mr. Reyat to an explosives test in the woods near Duncan, B.C., a few days before the bombing of Flight 182.

But Insp. Schwartz said Mr. Brar didn’t match the physical description of Mr. X provided by a surveillance team from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

There were also other discrepancies between the confession and facts known to the Mounties through other sources. Nevertheless, investigators looked into possible links between the Sikh youth federation and Babbar Khalsa.

Mr. Brar had been deported from Canada in the 1990s as a security risk, and the Mounties didn’t track him down and interview him in India until 2001.

By that time, said Insp. Schwartz, he was “well on his way to being eliminated” as a suspect in the bomb plot, but the force still wanted to talk to him. He denied any involvement in the bombing, and his comments about others were considered too unreliable for him to be a witness in any court case.

Rajvinder Singh Bains, the legal counsel for the Punjab Human Rights Organization, said the group conducted its own investigation of the affair after Mr. Malik and Mr. Bagri were acquitted.

A key source in that probe was Harmail Singh Chandi, a former Punjab policeman who is also reported to have been one of the sources for the RCMP years earlier. Mr. Chandi travelled to Ottawa last June but backed out of testifying at Mr. Major’s inquiry when he couldn’t get a guarantee his identity would be protected. His cover was later blown by a magazine report in India.

Mr. Bains said Monday his organization approached the RCMP in late 2005 and again in 2006 to try to share what it had discovered about the Parmar confession.

“Whether it’s true, whether it’s authentic … this is information only a police agency could have verified,” he said.

Instead, the Mounties indicated they already knew most of the story and the group eventually took its tale to counsel for Mr. Major.

But Mr. Bains and Sarabjit Singh, the secretary general to the human rights group, did meet the Mounties again last weekend to hand over additional material, including tape recordings related to the affair.

Mr. Bains said the recordings did not include tapes of Mr. Parmar’s purported confession. Rather, they were Punjabi police wiretaps that were part of an effort to lure Mr. Parmar from Pakistan onto Indian territory so he could be captured.

The RCMP is reviewing the tapes, which they had never heard previously, but details were not made public Monday. That’s because Major’s mandate requires him to steer clear of anything that could compromise continuing RCMP efforts to uncover fresh evidence that could be used in future criminal prosecutions.