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What next in the Air India case?
Some believe the Indianness of the tragedy has something to do with the sloppy probe, writes Gurmukh Singh.
Wednesday's verdict in which two Air India bombing suspects -- Ripduman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri -- were acquitted has raised myriad questions.
Amid the prevailing strong public sentiment, many say, the judge relied on hard facts and delivered what they call a judicial verdict.
However, the average Canadian is asking: who then planted the bombs which Justice Ian Bruce Josephson said originated in Vancouver?
Why didn't 20 years of investigations and millions in costs nail culprits?
Why couldn't the testimony of even one witnesses stand scrutiny in the court?
Who bungled it?
The two agencies -- the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service (CISS) -- are at the receiving end of this outrage.
As is evident now, these agencies could manage only circumstantial evidence which simply collapsed in the court. They produced witnesses whose testimonies were too ``incredible'' to nail the suspects. They faced cultural and linguistic problems while trying to ``penetrate'' the Indo-Canadian community. People were afraid to come out and be witnesses. One credible witnesses -- Indo-Canadian Times editor Tara Singh -- who could have made a difference to the outcome of the case, was killed in 1998.
The CSIS, which was created out of the RCMP in 1985, mounted surveillance on Talwinder Singh Parmar (whom the judge described as the mastermind behind the plot) and Bagri before and after the tragedy, but it destroyed key evidence by erasing 250-odd tapes of Parmar's phone conversations. This act has been described as "unacceptable negligence'' by the judge.
The CSIS had managed to plant its informants to keep tabs on the volatile section of the Indo-Canadian community in British Columbia after threats were made to the life of the then Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. But a former CSIS agent destroyed the tapes as he feared the identity of informants would be revealed when these tapes went to the RCMP for investigation.
Had these tapes been made available to the RCMP, the outraged relatives of the victims say, the bombing of flight 182 could have been averted.
It has also been revealed that the CSIS had abandoned its surveillance of Parmar days before the tragedy happened.
