Canadian Security Agencies Hit For An Air India Crash With 329 Victims
We don’t normally call attention to something that happened 25 years ago, but the Canadian public inquiry report on the bombing of Air India flight 182 in 1985 deserves the attention of security officers everywhere. The plane’s explosion off the Irish coast killed 329 people, making it “the largest case of mass murder in Canadian history and one of the world’s deadliest terrorist strikes.”
A five-volume report on the incident has just been issued. It blames “turf wars” between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for a failure to obtain and act on information that might have prevented the attack. The responsible parties were identified as Sikh militants based in British Columbia who sought to avenge a 1984 raid by Indian forces on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest site, where 800 Sikhs died.
A troubling aspect of the report for the present is a finding that relational weaknesses in Canada’s security systems still need to be fixed. We’d recommend learning about those interagency problems by reading at least a summary of the report.