The Canadian spy agency should have preserved key wiretap tapes of suspects in the 1985 Air India bombing case rather than destroying them, a former top agency official has testified before the inquiry commission.

"Certainly, I wish dearly that they (tapes) had not been destroyed," James Warren, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said in Toronto on Wednesday.

Warren said that he personally launched an internal probe in 1986 to find out why the tapes, which contained details of telephonic calls made by the prime suspects in the case, had been erased.

In spite of repeated speculation over the years that CSIS officials destroyed the tapes for nefarious reasons, Warren insisted his probe found otherwise.

The tapes were erased by lower-level employees of the agency who were simply following the policies in place at the time, he told Inquiry Commissioner John Major. "The tapes were erased by employees following a policy of erasing tapes 10 days after they have been transcribed," Warren said.

The lead counsel for the Air India inquiry, Mark Freiman, raised the issue directly in his opening question.

The inquiry is probing the June 1985 Kanishka bombing that claimed 329 lives; most of the victims were of Indian origin. The commission also examines whether new rules are required on how the agency deals with material that would be of use to police for criminal prosecution.                                               

The former CSIS official is the first person from the agency to appear this week as the inquiry focuses on the issue of tape erasures. Earlier this week, police officials and the Crown prosecutor on the Air India file, James Jardine, offered testimony that was highly critical of the spy agency's actions.

Lawyers and the police were frustrated that tapes of pre-bombing conversations involving key suspects, Talwinder Singh Parmar and Inderjit Singh Reyat, had been erased. The tapes were being sought for their possible value as evidence in future trials.

Warren's expression of regret, however, is a departure from previous CSIS statements from the period.

A CSIS letter, written by one R I MacEwan in 1990, was introduced at the commission on Wednesday. In the letter, the security service adamantly stated that the CSIS did not make a mistake in its application of the tape retention and destruction policy.