Rick Crook, former constable with the Vancouver Police, had a sickening feeling after hearing about the tragic bombing of Air India in which all 329 people died.
A British Columbian man, Harmail Singh Grewal had told Crook about a plot to blow up two Air India planes.
As the Air India public inquiry resumed its hearings on Monday in Ottawa, Crook testified how Grewal seemed willing to tell police who was behind the terrorist plot, but his lawyer at the time, George Angelomatis, prevented him from doing so unless a deal was reached.
A partial script of Grewal's conversation with police months before Air India flight 182 was blown out of the sky was reportedly released on Monday.
"Air India is state-controlled and, Indira Gandhi, they're trying to get back at Indira Gandhi by bombing an Air India plane," Grewal reportedly told Crook. "No Sikhs are traveling on Air India, they feel it will strike at the government."
Grewal also reportedly told the police how meetings had taken place in Lower Mainland restaurant in September or early October 1984 to discuss the plot and that some had already exchanged hands.
He took the information provided very seriously '...because of the magnitude of what he was talking about,' Crook told Justice John Major, who's chairing the Air India Inquiry."
So, he prepared a report and sent it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. There's nothing more he could do, as he was merely a constable with the municipal police, he said in his testimony.
When the Air India plane exploded in June 1985, and within an hour of another bomb targeting Air India blowing up at Narita Airport, Crook felt sick. "It was a sickening feeling to realise in all likelihood it was something you had spoken of eight months previously," Crook told this reporter.
"It was a bizarre concept to grasp," he's quoted in Vancouver Sun as saying. "And again it is within the benefit of hindsight that we take a look back and say why didn't we realise it, but you know we are talking pre-9/11 and all the concerns we know have about our security.
"It was a different time and place and it was unbelievable to consider that someone would be contemplating a monumental disaster such as Air India."
The hearings continue with Don McLean, formerly of the Vancouver Police, as the next witness.
Prosecutors blamed radical orthodox Sikh immigrants to Canada, saying the bombing was payback for the Indian government's 1984 operations at the Golden Temple.
But the only person jailed over the airline attack was bomb-maker Inderjit Singh Reyat, who now faces perjury charges over his testimony at the trial of two men acquitted in the plot in 2005.
The alleged mastermind of the plot, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was killed in a police shootout in India in 1992.
According to reports, other warnings came from the Indian government and Air India itself, which told Canada's federal police three weeks before the bombing that Sikh extremists in Canada were planning to bomb Air India flights.
The inquiry heard three weeks of emotional testimony last fall from the victims' families recounting their personal ordeals and frustrations over the last two decades. But there have been hardly any hearings since then on the details of what happened.
Most of the delay can be attributed to haggling between commission counsel and lawyers for the federal government over how much of the documentary trail and oral testimony from here on will be public and how much will remain behind closed doors for reasons of national security.
(With PTI Inputs)
