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National Post

Terry Glavin: Air India terrorist attack was Canada's worst failure in history

On Sunday morning, June 23, 1985, shortly after 8 a.m local time, Air India Flight 182 disappeared from the air traffic control radar screens at Ireland's Shannon Airport. The Boeing 747 Kanishka was heading east towards London at an altitude of 9,400 metres, roughly 100 nautical miles southwest of County Cork's Sheeps Head Peninsula, and then, suddenly, it was gone. Article content Article content In the wheelhouse of the the 23,000- tonne British vessel Laurentian Forest, which was carrying a cargo of Canadian newsprint to London, the radio picked up an SOS broadcast from the Irish Coast Guard station on Valentia Island. Captain Roddy McDougall responded immediately, diverting his ship towards the coordinates where the airliner was reported to have vanished, 37 miles away. Article content Article content Article content Two hours later and first on the scene, McDougall's ship came upon scattered pieces of wreckage and corpses floating in a sheen of jet fuel. Equipped with only a single lifeboat, the 26 officers and crew of the Laurentian Forest spent the next 12 hours frantically searching for survivors and retrieving the dead from the sea, wrapping the corpses in improvised body bags. The Laurentian Forest was soon joined by the Irish naval vessel L.E. Aisling. Eventually 18 ships joined the search, assisted by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Air Force. Article content There was nothing to do by then but collect the dead and the detritus of the worst mass murder in Canadian history and the bloodiest act of terrorism in the history of aviation prior to the al-Qaida atrocities of September 11, 2001. The bombing of Air India Flight 182 was also the worst failure in security intelligence in Canadian history, the most outrageously bungled police investigation and the most humiliating rupture in the administration of justice in Canadian history. Article content Article content There has never been a full and proper reckoning for any of it. Article content Article content It's not just that the Khalistani terrorists who hid the bomb in luggage placed aboard Air India Flight 182 in Vancouver were well known to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and to Canada's fledgling spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. That same day, at Narita Airport in Japan, another Khalistani bomb from Vancouver, placed aboard another Air India plane, exploded prematurely, killing two baggage handlers. Article content It's not just that the operation was carried out by Babbar Khalsa, which Ottawa preferred to leave unmolested as a perfectly legal terrorist organization, or that Babbar Khalsa godfather Talwinder Singh Parmar and his accomplices were under active surveillance as they planned and carried out their plot. It's not just that in the weeks before the SOS call went out from the Coast Guard station on Valentia Island, the RCMP and CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment were well aware that a terror attack targeting Air India was in the works.