A-I bombing: 'Bring out all facts'

The Canadian Judicial Commission investigating the 1985 bombing of an Air India Boeing 747, which killed 329 people has been urged by relatives of the victims to look into various aspects of the tragedy and bring out the truth.

Relatives of two victims pleaded before the commission, headed by former Supreme Court judge John Major to evaluate all the issues carefully and bring out all the facts, even if they are not complimentary to the Canadian government and its interests.

Rattan Singh Kalsi couldn't keep his voice from breaking as he described the dream of his daughter Indira -- to complete her degree in nursing at the University of Guelph, move to Punjab and open a free dispensary to distribute medicine to the poor.

Instead she perished, along with 328 others, in the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history.

"She wanted to help the very same people who killed her," a media report quoted Kalsi as saying.

Justice Major is examining the bombing of the plane, believed to have been planted by Sikh extremists based in British Columbia. Only one man has ever been convicted in the plot.

"It is unacceptable that Canada should be a safe haven for conducting activities against other governments," said Haranhalli Radhakrishna, who lost his wife, daughter and son in the bombing.

"The first religion of each and every Canadian should be decency and allegiance to Canadian security," he said.

Ann Venketeswaran, whose husband died aboard Flight 182, suggested --  as have other witnesses -- that Canada's official policy of multiculturalism may have inadvertently contributed to sectarian strife. 

"We have simply taken it too far," she said. "Trying to accommodate all the diverse cultures in Canada, we have treated extremist movements in a deferential attitude. People should not be able to hide behind multiculturalism to spread hate and division," she said.

Major has set aside the first three weeks of his inquiry to let the victims' families tell their stories in their own words.

After that will come months of testimony from federal officials, police, security officers and the airline industry.

The aim is to determine whether the lessons of the Air India disaster have been learned, or whether further reforms to anti-terrorist policy are needed to head off similar attacks in future.

Ram Chandra Gopalan remembers exactly what he was doing the afternoon of June 23, 1985. He was at home in India, reading the Sunday paper, when he heard about the disaster.

"Suddenly I felt suffocated. I felt as if, like in a swimming pool, the water started rising in the room, and I was trying to go above the level of water to breathe. The feeling was so strange. I got really terrified," Gopalan said.

An hour later he got a call from a relative in Canada. The Air India plane carrying his brother Krishna Kumar, a mechanical engineer from Toronto, had plunged into the Atlantic near Ireland.

Like other relatives who told their stories to the commission, Gopalan has difficulty understanding why only one man has ever been convicted in the terrorist bombing.

Inderjit Singh Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter for his role in the plot. The suspected ringleader Talwinder Singh Parmar was shot dead by police in India in 1992.

Two more men were acquitted in 2005 in a verdict that shocked victims' relatives.