Sniffer dog missed chance to stop 1985 AI bombing

OTTAWA: A Canadian policeman and his bomb-sniffing dog were robbed of the opportunity to search Air India Flight 182 before it departed Montreal, an inquiry into the 1985 aircraft bombing heard on Wednesday.   

Quebec provincial police Sergeant Serge Carignan, now retired, and his pooch Arko were called to Mirabel International Airport in Montreal to sniff for explosives in luggage in the evening of June 22, 1985.   

But when they arrived, the jetliner had already taken off, he testified.   

Hours later, a blast killed 329 passengers and crew members, including 280 Canadians, off the coast of Ireland in the world's worst airline attack prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.   

"I did not have a chance to search that airplane and I believe that if I had, if I had a chance to search it, things might have turned out differently," he said, contradicting federal police statements that the jet was searched.   

"I believe that we would have found the explosives," Carignan said.   

Instead, Carignan and Arko were asked only to check out three bags left behind that were considered suspicious, he said. "The information I was given is that the passengers were allowed to board the plane, and as they were doing so, they would identify their luggage and that it was a way that they had declared the plane to be secured."   

"All I had left to do was search or have the dog sniff three suitcases that had been left behind, as they were regarded as suspicious."   

"The dog gave me no indication of presence of explosives in the suitcases."   

Prosecutors blamed radical orthodox Sikh immigrants to Canada for the bombing, saying it was payback for the Indian government's 1984 army attack on the Sikhs' Golden Temple.   

But the only person jailed over the airline attack was bomb-maker Inderjit Singh Reyat, who now faces perjury charges over his testimony at the trial of two men acquitted in the plot in 2005.   

The alleged mastermind, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was killed in a police shootout in India in 1992. Since the bombing, Canadian governments have insisted the threat was not clear. But the public inquiry has heard that warnings came from two police informers and several intelligence intercepts, as well as New Delhi and Air India itself.   

Canadian authorities' inability to stop the bombing despite the warning signals and the tailing of the suspects has been a continual frustration for the victims' families.