AI bombing: Rescuers narrate horror

Canadian Judicial Commission investigating into the 1985 bombing of an Air India Boeing 747 off the Irish coast heard the testimony of English and Irish rescuers who first reached on the scene.

Daniel Brown, a Scottish-born merchant seaman on the MV Laurentian Forest, a commercial vessel that was on the scene, submitted before Justice John Major Commission on Wednesday in Ottawa that he saw dismembered bodies covered with slick, oil and aviation fuel carried onto a lifeboat.

"Some were dismembered, one with torso split and intestines spilling out. Crew members were crying; some were physically ill," Brown said.

He said that he personally dragged half a dozen bodies aboard, including that of a long-haired Sikh whose face was riveted into his memory.

"His eyes were wide open; his mouth was wide open in a scream... He had a look of horror on his face. At one point the lifeboat was nearly sucked beneath the screws of the Laurentian Forest in the rough seas," Brown said.

"I had to lie on top of the bodies to keep my head under the gunwales," Canadian Press reported quoting Brown.

Mark Stagg, the watch officer on the Laurentian Forest, told in a quavering voice of being handed a dead infant to place in a makeshift body bag.

"My faith in goodness, and God, and sense, and normality died then," said Stagg, adding, "Sitting here with all of you, I cannot begin to describe the utter wrongness of putting children into plastic bags."

Though he maintained a steely exterior at the time, Stagg has been plagued ever since by nightmares and flashbacks, which he now describes as 'manageable' thanks to belated counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Two decades later there are still days, said Stagg, when "I feel that slightly sick, panicky feeling in my stomach like a lost child."

Air India Flight 182, bound for New Delhi from Toronto and Montreal, was downed by a terrorist bomb off the Irish coast on June 23, 1985. There were no survivors among the 329 passengers and crew. Two Japanese baggage handlers died the same day when another bomb exploded on the ground at Narita Airport near Tokyo. Both blasts were blamed on Sikh extremists campaigning for a separate homeland.

The Major Commission has a mandate to investigate a range of issues arising from the worst terrorist act in Canadian history, including the turf wars between the RCMP and CSIS that hampered the initial investigation. He is also looking into broader questions of airline security, terrorist fundraising and money-laundering, and potential changes in the court system for future terrorist trials.

The hearing will run until April. The judge hopes to deliver a report to the government in September next year.