RCMP Watch

A retired Quebec policeman testified yesterday he could have prevented the Air India disaster but the doomed plane was cleared to leave Canada before his bomb-sniffing dog could search it.

“I’ve always wondered why, if I was called to search an airplane and some luggage . . . why did they let the airplane go before I arrived there,” Serge Carignan told the Air India inquiry.

“I did not have a chance to search that airplane. I believe that if I had a chance to search it, things might have turned out differently.

“I believe that we would have found it — the explosives.”

The testimony is more evidence of a 23-year RCMP coverup of sheer incompetence, said Vancouver Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, the former premier of B.C. and a critic of Sikh extremism in the 1980s.

He said he found it “astounding” and “horrifying” that the RCMP had claimed dog-sniffing procedures were followed properly.

“For the RCMP to provide a report to [an earlier inquiry by former Ontario premier Bob Rae] to say all of that was done, that which was never done? That’s astounding. That’s horrifying that a police force of which I have been proud as a Canadian ever since I came to this country in 1968, would make a report that would be false.”

Carignan testified that he got a phone call at home from his supervisor the night of June 22, 1985.

He was told the RCMP needed him and his dog Arko to fill in for their own absent canine team in the search of a jumbo jet and its luggage. But by the time Carignan got to Mirabel Airport in Montreal, the plane had taken off.

Carignan was left to check three suspicious suitcases that had been pulled aside in preflight screening. They turned out to be harmless, but the next morning his wife, Karen, woke him with shocking news.

“She had heard on the radio that an Air India flight had been reported missing and had been blown out of the sky,” Carignan said.

The terrorist bomb that brought down Flight 182 and killed 329 people off Ireland was hidden in luggage from a connecting CP Air flight that originated in Vancouver and was loaded aboard Air India in Toronto. It was among the luggage that Carignan never got to check during the stopover in Montreal.

The luggage loaded in Toronto had ostensibly been screened before leaving Toronto. But the

X-ray machine had broken down, leaving much of the baggage to be given a once-over with a hand-held electronic wand which, it turned out, didn’t work, either.

Carignan, now retired on Vancouver Island, said he was never interviewed by the RCMP in the criminal investigation that followed the bombing. It wasn’t until last week that his wife called inquiry lawyers and told them her husband had a story to tell.

Last week, Ontario Lt.-Gov. James Bartleman testified how he had, as an intelligence director at Foreign Affairs at the time, seen top-secret intelligence days before the bombing indicating Air India could be targeted by Sikh extremists that weekend. He said he showed it to an RCMP officer but was brushed off.

Bartleman’s testimony contradicted 22 years of claims by the federal government that, despite a series of general threats against the airline, there was no tip suggesting a specific plane was in jeopardy.

Dosanjh, who has advocated on behalf of the victims’ families for years, said: “All of the contradictions and missing documents, documents that aren’t there, that can’t be traced, and reports that are now being contradicted by actual testimony by the police officers that were part of the monitoring at that time, all of that can’t be sheer incompetence.

“It leads me to believe that if you put all of the pieces together of the contradictions, the missing documents, one is being led to a possible conclusion of a coverup. It begins to be seen as the makings of a coverup.”

The bombing has been blamed on Sikh separatists who used B.C. as a base to campaign for a homeland in northern India. Only one man, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was ever convicted for his role in the plot. Another, Talwinder Singh Parmar, the suspected ringleader, was shot dead by police in India in 1992, and two more were acquitted at trial in Vancouver two years ago.