Kanishka probe: Key witness feared for life

TORONTO: A key witness in the probe of the 1985 Kanishka bombing was reluctant to co-operate with police from the start as she feared for her life, the Air India inquiry has heard.

Willy Laurie, a former agent of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), testified before Justice John Major on Monday that a close friend of accused Ajaib Singh Bagri, told him not to pass on her information to police as Bagri, a leader of the Babbar Khalsa terrorist group, would kill her and children.
    
Laurie narrated the first meet with the woman, identified only as Ms E, in September 1987. She broke down, began sobbing and fell to floor as she described Bagri visiting her house on June 21, 1985, two days before an Air India flight blew up off the coast of Ireland killing 329 people.
   
The woman told Laurie that Bagri had wanted to borrow her car to take luggage to the airport but she turned it down.

"She said the next day when she saw the news that she knew he was the one who did it," Laurie testified.
   
She repeated it to Laurie on three different occasions within a month and said she was "100 per cent certain" about the timing of Bagri's visit.
   
Laurie, who began his career with the RCMP in 1972 and retired from the police force last April, knew immediately that the information revealed could be vital to the criminal case.
   
Yet it took more than three years before the information provided by the woman was passed on to the RCMP, he said.

But when the woman was called as a Crown witness at the Air India trial that led to Bagri's acquittal, she feigned memory loss, according to the trial judge who ruled she was so terrified she was willing to lie on the stand.