Inquiry spokesman Michael Tansey said the public hearings will reopen on March 5 with testimony from present and former security and police officers, as well as academic experts.
TORONTO: The inquiry into the 1985 bombing of an Air India plane that killed over 300 people is set to resume on Monday, even though officials have not resolved a long-running dispute over secret evidence.
Inquiry spokesman Michael Tansey said the public hearings will reopen on March 5 with testimony from present and former security and police officers, as well as academic experts.
The inquiry will, for now, concentrate on background issues related to the creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in the early 1980s, and the general perception of terrorist threats at that time.
That means that the commission has decided to rearrange its witness list and sidestep a public confrontation with the government amid ongoing negotiations on the issue of sensitive documents that have been heavily censored on national-security grounds.
John C Major, the former Supreme Court judge who heads the inquiry, threatened two weeks ago to shut down proceedings if the officials didn’t relent in their secrecy policy.
Major and his counsel have seen the material in question and have the legal power to deal with it in private.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded by saying he would pass the word, through his national security adviser, for government departments to adopt a “non-restrictive interpretation” of federal secrecy law in an effort to resolve the dispute.
Talks have been going on since then between government lawyers and commission counsel, but there has been no word on whether they’re making progress.
“The discussions are continuing,” Tansey was quoted as saying by Canadian Press. The Kanishka jet blew apart off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, killing 329 people, most of them Canadian citizens of Indian origin or descent.
It’s known that CSIS had several key suspects under surveillance long before the attack, but nobody put the pieces of the puzzle together in time to thwart the plot. The inquiry was about to delve into the question when Major abruptly adjourned the hearings and levelled his threat to shut down for good.
The planned testimony on pre-bombing surveillance would have been “heavily dependent” on cross-references to censored documents, Tansey said. Only one man has ever been convicted in the bomb plot. Two more — Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri — were acquitted at a trial in Vancouver in 2005.
The federal inquiry is examining whether there was adequate assessment of the terrorist threat, the relationship between the RCMP and CSIS, and issues related to Canadian aviation security. RCMP investigators had hoped to call reluctant witnesses before special investigative hearings where they could be compelled to tell a judge what they know.
But that plan evaporated this week when opposition MPs stymied a Conservative government effort to extend the law mandating such hearings for an additional three years.
The legislation came into force in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the previous year in the United States. But a sunset clause limited the use of the special hearings to just five years, and that time ran out March 1.
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