Canada was a haven for terrorists after Operation Blue Star in 1984, a lawyer representing the families of the victims told the Air India inquiry.

"It appeared to me in 1984 and 1985 it was open season for terrorists. It is frightening to think it took five months for Canada's spy agency to get a warrant approved to tap calls of suspected bombing mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar," Norm Boxall said.

An application for the warrant to tap phone calls, dated October 19, 1984, stated that Parmar had been calling for the murder of 50,000 Hindus and other acts of violence for months in speeches across Canada. Yet the warrant was not approved until March 1985, three months before Air India disaster that killed all 329 aboard.

The October warrant document, marked top secret, called Parmar the most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country.

Jacques Jodoin, a former official with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said the delay was bureaucratic because CSIS had just been formed the previous summer and was still grappling with teething problems.

The system was such that it was bogged down, Jodoin told Justice John Major, the inquiry commissioner.

But Boxall said the explanation is just not good enough, especially when two informants told Vancouver police in October 1984 that Parmar and associates were plotting to bomb an Air India flight.

"Perhaps if they had that wiretap up then, and you had the human sources in conjunction with the wiretap, you may well have had the evidence. It does not make sense to me," Boxall said.

He said nobody knows what evidence could have been obtained if Canadian spy agency (CSIS) had been listening earlier to the conversations of Parmar, who was killed by Punjab Police in 1992.

There is evidence at the Air India inquiry that it took five months for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to get a supposedly urgent wiretap warrant on the man who became the key suspect in the 1985 bombing.

Documents tabled at the inquiry show CSIS started trying in September 1984 to tap Parmar, founder of the militant Babar Khalsa sect.

The service had evidence that he had been preaching Sikh audiences across the country on the need to take violent action against the Indian government.

But Jodoin, said there was a backlog of wiretap requests at the time, and it took months for even an urgent case to get through the system. The authorization for surveillance of Parmar finally came through in early 1985. However, some tapes could not be used as evidence in court.

Parmar was never prosecuted in Canada and was shot dead by police in India in 1992.