The Inquiry Commission into the 1985 Air India bombing has observed that racism played a part in the way Ottawa responded to the tragedy that killed 329 passengers on board.
TORONTO: The Inquiry Commission into the 1985 Air India bombing has observed that racism played a part in the way Ottawa responded to the tragedy that killed 329 passengers on board.
Its "hard not to share" an impression held by some of the families of the victims that race played a factor in how the investigation was handled, Justice John Major of the Air India Bombing Inquiry Commission said.
"That is the fact that, if it had been an Air Canada plane and Anglo-Saxons, things would have been different," he said when former Ontario Premier Bob Rae testified before the commission.
Rae said he gathered from his interactions with the families of the victims that they felt their loss had not been adequately understood as a Canadian tragedy.
"Many of them said to me that if the colour of their skin had been different, the level of sharing would have been different. Whole families were wiped out," Rae said.
"This is a Canadian tragedy. It happened to us," he said.
Rae, however, found no evidence of racism among government officials, police and intelligence officers during his preliminary investigation.
But he noticed "culturally driven" issues, such as delays of several weeks in translating wiretap surveillance tapes of the bombing suspects from Punjabi into English.
The delays were caused by the lack of qualified translators, which US authorities also experienced in their surveillance efforts prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks, Rae said.
"That's not racism but it certainly leads to ineffective surveillance," Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported quoting Rae. "It means that you can't really understand what's going on, on a snap basis."
Rae also said Canada still has a lot to learn about security in the age of terrorism from the Air India tragedy, which "should never have happened."
"It's one of those tragic situations where everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong and the consequences were simply disastrous for the people who were on board that flight," said Rae , who conducted his own investigation in 2005 to identify questions and issues surrounding the tragedy.
"The first point was that the bag should never have been allowed on the plane without a passenger. And secondly, the bag should never have gone through a screening system without being detected in Toronto."
Rae, a current federal Liberal party leadership candidate, said while most people consider the 9/11 attacks as the moment the world woke up to the realities of terrorism, Canadians had a much earlier event that should have drawn their attention to the dangers of extremism.
"We should have come of age on June 23, 1985," Rae said in reference to the date of the bombings, which killed 331 people. "I got a continuing sense that we still hadn't come to grips with what happened."
The 1985 bombing killed 329 passengers aboard Air India Flight 182, which crashed off the west coast of Ireland. Of the passengers, 280 were Canadian citizens and 82 were children. A separate luggage bomb destined for a second Air India flight killed two Japanese baggage handlers at Tokyo's Narita airport.
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