RCMP Watch

(CBC News) - Families of those killed in the 1985 Air India bombing want a formal apology from the federal government, their lawyers said Friday as the public inquiry wrapped up after 18 months.
Flight 182 went down in the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland on June 23, 1985, killing all 329 people, many of them Canadians.
Lawyers [...]

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Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) - The Air India inquiry ended yesterday as it began 16 months ago, with charges of systemic racism and comments about infighting between the RCMP and Canada’s spy agency that plagued the terrorist probe.
In the final day of evidence, Commissioner John Major heard that a University of Toronto sociologist believes racism [...]

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Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) - The overwhelming despair of Air India victims’ families was compounded by a sense that Canada treated them like second-class citizens, inquiry commissioner John Major said in an interim report released Tuesday.”A question that lingers among the families and other Canadians is: ‘If Air India Flight 182 had been an Air [...]

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Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) - Canadian agencies dealing with airport security did not take the warnings to Air India seriously enough before the devastating bombing of June 23, 1985, the Air India inquiry heard Friday.
University of Ottawa professor William Leiss, a risk analysis expert, said the telexes and memos before the bombing suggesting Air India [...]

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Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) - Former Ontario Lt.-Gov. James Bartleman “misled” the Air India inquiry when he claimed last May to have seen a document with a specific advance warning of the June 23, 1985, attack, the Ottawa inquiry heard Thursday.
Pierre Lacompte, who worked at the time for the secretive Communications Security Establishment, said [...]

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Bill Curry, Ottawa (Globe and Mail) - Former CSIS director Reid Morden rejected claims of an almost unworkable relationship between the spy agency and the RCMP, urging the Air India inquiry yesterday not to mess with a system that is working well.
Contradicting Friday’s testimony from former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, Mr. Morden urged the commission [...]

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Jim Brown, Ottawa (Canadian Press) - A top Mountie is standing by a controversial claim that the Air India bombers could have been brought to justice years ago, if only Canada’s spy agency hadn’t erased key wiretap tapes.
RCMP deputy commissioner Gary Bass told a public inquiry yesterday he’s convinced the missing material could have been [...]

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Ottawa (Canadian Press) - Canadians should be wary of giving police too free a rein in the name of fighting terrorism, says the former head of the country’s spy agency.
Reid Morden told the Air India inquiry today that he’s against any proposal to lower the legal threshold for police to obtain wiretaps or conduct searches [...]

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Ottawa (Canadian Press) - A top Mountie is standing by a controversial assertion that the Air India bombing could have been solved earlier if Canada’s spy service had not erased key wiretap tapes.
RCMP Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass first voiced the opinion in a 1996 memo arguing that the tapes could have provided evidence to support [...]

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Gurmukh Singh (UK World News) - A Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer sprang a surprise at the ongoing Air India inquiry when he said that the plot to bomb the Delhi-bound Flight 182 in June 1985 could possibly have been solved long ago if the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) had not stopped his [...]

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