A public inquiry into the 1985 Air-India bombing is facing an unexpected delay as lawyers sift through two decades of documents and figure out what should remain secret for national security reasons.
TORONTO: A public inquiry into the 1985 Air-India bombing is facing an unexpected delay as lawyers sift through two decades of documents and figure out what should remain secret for national security reasons.
Commission counsel Mark Freiman said they will have to postpone until February the testimony of many key witnesses who were scheduled to begin appearing at hearings this month.
The process of looking into the 21-year-paper trail received a setback when electronic versions of documents that had been censored for national-security reasons and were ready for release were accidentally erased by Justice Department officials.
"There has been quite a serious glitch in the uploading of documents and that has resulted in the IT equivalent of 'the dog ate my homework,'" Freiman said early this week.
The Justice Department insists that the inquiry staff use its system for managing the relevant government documents due to security reasons. Freiman said he still hopes the inquiry can wrap up hearings by next April -- a timetable that would allow former Supreme Court judge John Major to meet his target of September 2007 for writing and delivering the report.
"We will be able to accomplish most of what we wanted to do in exactly the same amount of time that was budgeted," he said outside the hearing room.
"If it turns out that, in order to do a good job we have to take a little longer, we'll take the route of doing a good job," he added.
The Kanishka flight was bombed over the North Atlantic in 1985 en route to India from Canada, killing all 329 on board. Eighty per cent of the victims were of Indian origin or descent.
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