Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) – The Air India investigation was hampered by the lack of co-operation by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in handing over information it had collected on suspects, former RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster told the bombing inquiry Thursday.
Mr. Inkster, who headed the RCMP from 1987 to 1994, said that for years he pushed the fledgling spy agency to provide more information related to the June 1985 terrorist plot.
?It was certainly a relationship that had its difficulties,? Mr. Inkster told inquiry commissioner John Major.
?Certainly attempts to get documents from CSIS in a timely way were difficult.?
RCMP requests for information would sometimes get lost in the mail for weeks or months. And CSIS was constantly asking the RCMP for details about what investigators specifically wanted.
?You couldn?t be more specific if you didn?t know what they had,? Mr. Inkster said. ?It is only the investigator that can determine the relevance of information.?
Mr. Inkster said the problem with information sharing ?was frustrating for the officers because they said I really need to see the whole thing so that I can judge it myself.?
Mr. Inkster said he didn?t believe the problems were due to malice, but because CSIS was cautious about its differing mandate from that of the RCMP.
?I understood it but it was disconcerting,? said Mr. Inkster.
The Ottawa inquiry has heard months of evidence about tensions between the two agencies both before and after the Air India attack that left 331 dead.
Mr. Inkster said that because CSIS was formed just 10 months before the bombing ?many of the rules were still being written.?
He also disagreed with a document shown to him that said the RCMP felt the erasure by CSIS of hundreds of wiretaps made of bombing mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar had no impact on the investigation.
?It certainly would have been beneficial to have all the tapes,? Inkster testified. ?One can only speculate what opportunities for investigation the tapes might have had.?
The RCMP and CSIS had also clashed over human sources and which agency should have priority access to people in the Sikh community believed to have information about the bombing suspects.
Inkster said that as a police officer for 36 years, ?the criminal prosecution needs to take precedence.?
In the case of serious criminal acts involving ?death, murder ? any of those heinous crimes ? I think it is clear that we need to prosecute the crime,? he said.
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