RCMP Watch

Jim Brown, Ottawa (Canadian Press) - The RCMP told a reluctant witness in the Air India bombings that if she tried to back out of a commitment to testify against a key suspect she could be arrested and forced to appear in court.

But Inspector Doug Best, appearing yesterday at a public inquiry, insisted his words had to be viewed “in context” and he didn’t mean them as a threat. The message he actually meant to convey, Insp. Best said, was that “clearly we would not want to be arresting a witness that we wanted to come to court.“Obviously, if you failed to show up we would have to issue an arrest warrant. But it wasn’t said in any kind of threatening manner, nor did I take it that it was perceived in that manner.”

The comment about possible arrest, recorded in Insp. Best’s notebook from March of 1998, came during a meeting with a woman known only as Ms. E. who had become a key witness against Ajaib Singh Bagri, one of the prime suspects in the 1985 bombings that took 331 lives.

The Mounties had initially approached the woman as a potential witness within months of the downing of Air India Flight 182 but concluded at the time she couldn’t help them.

They changed their minds five years later, after learning Ms E. had made potentially incriminating statements about Mr. Bagri to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

The RCMP tried on and off for the next seven years to persuade her to co-operate with them, but she repeatedly dodged their questions or changed her story.

She had told CSIS she would never testify against Mr. Bagri because she feared he would kill her and her children.

She finally gave Insp. Best a terse, one-page statement in early 1997 that could serve as a legal basis for eventual courtroom testimony. But he was fearful that she could change her mind and continued to drop in on Ms. E. periodically over the next two years to see whether she was still onside.

He stopped only when her husband finally told him bluntly to direct any further questions to their lawyer.

The woman did indeed testify when Mr. Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik were eventually prosecuted for the bombings. But she claimed in court she couldn’t remember most of the things she had previously said in confidence to investigators.

Mr. Bagri and Mr. Malik were acquitted of all charges in 2005. The inquiry, under former Supreme Court judge John Major, has no power to revisit that verdict or hold anyone criminally responsible for the bombings.