Questioning the Ongoing Air India Inquiry

http://www.khalistan.com/Letters/Stephen%20Harper%20Priminister%20of%20Canada%20_051607.htm

The Council of Khalistan
“RECOGNIZE YE ALL THE HUMAN RACE AS ONE”
Guru Gobind Singh Ji, Tenth Master

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6 Canada

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

I am writing in regard to your new inquiry into the Air India Flight 182 bombing of 1985. I see no purpose for this ongoing inquiry. As you know, the Indian government continues to try to blame Sikhs for this atrocity, despite the fact that Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri were acquitted by a Canadian judge, who said that the witnesses against them were “not credible.”

Shortly after the bombing occurred, two Canadian journalists, Zuhair Kashmeri of the Toronto Globe and Mail and Brian McAndrew of the Toronto Star, wrote an excellent book on the case entitled Soft Target, which proves that the Indian government itself carried out the bombing. This finding is confirmed in a book by former Member of Parliament David Kilgour entitled Betrayal: The Spy Canada Abandoned. I urge you to call Mr. Kashmeri and Mr. Mcandrew as witnesses in the inquiry.

Soft Target shows how the Indian regime bombed its own airliner in 1985, killing 329 innocent people, to justify further repression against the Sikhs. The book quotes an investigator from the Canadian Security Investigation Service as saying, “If you really want to clear the incidents quickly, take vans down to the Indian High Commission and the consulates in Toronto and Vancouver, load up everybody and take them down for questioning. We know it and they know it that they are involved.”

Among many other things, they note that the Indian Consul General in Toronto, Mr. Surinder Malik (no relation to Ripudaman Singh Malik), called in a detailed description of the disaster just hours later when it took the Canadian investigators weeks to find that information. He told them that they should check the passenger manifest for an “L.Singh” because he was responsible — before there was any public knowledge of the bombing!

According to Wikipedia, on June 20, 1985, two days before the flight, “at 1910 GMT, a man paid for the two tickets with $3,005 in cash at a CP ticket office in Vancouver. The names on the reservations were changed; ‘Jaswand Singh’ became ‘M. Singh’ and ‘Mohinderbel Singh’ became ‘L. Singh.’”. Note that this is the same name that Consul General Malik told investigators to look for – “L. Singh.”

It would later come out in newspaper reports that a Sikh named Lal Singh told the press that he was offered “two million dollars and settlement in a nice country” by the Indian regime to give false testimony in the case.

Malik had also pulled his wife and daughter off the flight suddenly at the last minute, on the feeble excuse that the daughter had a paper for school. A friend of Consul General Malik’s who was a car dealer also cancelled at the last minute.

According to Kashmeri and McAndrew, “Curiously, [Consul General] Malik knew more details about the two blasts than did the police investigators….Malik said that while one of the suspects was booked to Japan, the other was booked to Toronto and onwards to Bombay. He also said that the two checked their bomb-laden bags but did not board the flight themsleves. In sum, Malik had painted a scenario of the double sabotage operation that was a near perfect account of what the Mounties would take weeks to fathom.

[Consul General] Malik continually fed the Globe information pointing to Sikh terrorists as the source of the bombs. He was behind another story six days after the crash, this one headlined ‘Air-India pilot reported given parcel by Sikh.’” Kashmeri and McAndrew also wrote, “Malik pressured the Globe to publish this story, adding that it could be used to make a stronger case for blaming the Air-India and Narita bombings on the Babbar Khalsa leader. Malik also decried the Canadian system of justice for failing to come up with a quick solution to the bombings. ‘In India we would have had a confession by now. You people have too many civil and human-rights laws,’ he complained.”

The Sikh organization that the Indian government said was responsible, Babbar Kahlsa, is and was then heavily infiltrated by Indian government operatives at very high levels of the organization. The main backer of the group had received a $2 million loan from the State Bank of India just before the plane was attacked, according to Soft Target. The year after the bombing, three Indian consuls general were asked to leave the country.

In his book, Kilgour wrote that Canadian-Polish double agent Ryszard Paszkowski was approached to join a plot to carry out a second bombing. The people who approached Paszkowski were connected to the Indian government.

Yet the Indian government continues to apply pressure to find some Sikhs guilty of the bombing. I am sure that your inquiry will be conducted with fairness and justice. I hope that you will find the real culprits and put this matter to rest. The bombing was an Indian government operation from the beginning.

If there is anything I can do to assist you, please feel free to contact me. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh
President
Council of Khalistan

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Apu?!

Our ~resident FR Khalistan activist~ ping!

"...which proves that the Indian government itself carried out the bombing. "

Yea, right.

http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/may/01ai.htm
AI blast: Canadian authorities were warned

Ajit Jain in Toronto

May 01, 2007 02:24 IST Last Updated: May 01, 2007 06:10 IST Canadian authorities were warned about a plot “to strike at the government of India” for its operations in the Golden Temple in Amritsar before the 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329 people, a former police officer told the Air India Judicial Commission on Monday. 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)

What Rajiv Gandhi told Canada PM after A-I blast

May 03, 2007 09:54 IST

In a phone call just after the bombing of the Air India plane in 1985, then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had asked his Canadian counterpart why all the baggage on the flight was not removed and rechecked in Montreal when three pieces were found to be suspicious.

Gandhi had suggested to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that Canada had breached international procedures by not re-screening the luggage on Flight 182.

Details of the emotionally-charged exchange were revealed on Wednesday in declassified government documents released at the judicial inquiry probing the June 23, 1985 bombing that killed 329 and a blast the same day at Tokyo’s Narita Airport that killed two.

A June 27 briefing document about the call says: ‘Overall impression was that Gandhi was highly excited, perturbed and concerned, but highly appreciative of the call.’

‘After Candian PM related his sympathies and condolences, Gandhi said he understood three suitcases had been pulled from Air India flight in Montreal and his understanding was that when such a thing happened, it was standard (international) practise that all suitcases would be searched, but this had not been done in this case,’ the document says.

‘Our PM did not comment directly on this but went on to say that in response to Indian requests, we had made every effort to ensure safety of Indian diplomatic personnel and premises in Canada. We would redouble our protective efforts and prosecute to the full extent of the law anyone involved in illegal action,’ National Post reported, quoting the documents.

The briefing note says Gandhi had already heard of the Narita bombing as well and the two prime ministers agreed it looked like there was a sinister connection. The fact that Mulroney first called Gandhi to express condolences on the loss of life on the plane when most of the passengers were Canadians has long been criticised.

But the intimate details of the conversation between the two former prime ministers sheds much more light on the response to what at the time was an unprecedented act of terrorism.

The briefing says that while Gandhi, a trained commercial pilot, was not directly questioning Canadian security measures before the bombing, ‘it is clear this question is implied.’

The document says Mulroney asked staff to investigate Gandhi’s concerns about the baggage.

‘Mulroney has asked Canadian authorities for a full report and we will relay that to Indian authorities,’ says the memo, which was signed by an Ottawa official with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Another memo released at the inquiry describes a meeting on June 25, 1985 between Bartleman’s minister, Joe Clark, and S J S Chhatwal, then Indian High Commissioner in Canada, about the bombing.

At the meeting, Clark said ‘he had for some time been very concerned about some activities within the Indian ethnic community in Canada involving extremist elements,’ the document says.

‘Clark said that he had personally talked with the president of India about this issue at the time of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s funeral and had stressed the importance of counteracting extremism.’

The declassified memos, briefing notes and documents from both CSIS and the RCMP show that massive amounts of intelligence had been gathered for years before the bombings about plot mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar and Babbar Khalsa, the terrorist group he founded in 1978.

‘On date, 1984/04/07, at the height of the conflict in Punjab, the Babbar Khalsa threatened to kidnap or kill the Indian Consul General in Vancouver,’ a June 29, 1985, CSIS document says.

‘This telephone threat was also directed at members of the consul’s family. In 1981 and again in 1984, the Babbar Khalsa penned its name to threatening letters to the prime minister and other high officials in India. These letters were postmarked, Vancouver,’ the documents said.

Startling revelations have come out this week at the inquiry headed by retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Major about repeated warnings made to law enforcement agencies about bomb plots against Air India.

Equally startling have been repeated examples of warnings not being shared between agencies or different levels of government.

No witnesses testified on Wednesday, but Ontario Lieutenant Governor James Bartleman will take the stand when the inquiry resumes on Friday. At the time of the bombing, he was in charge of the intelligence analysis and security branch of the Department of External Affairs.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Kanishka_Rajiv_Gandhi_had_questioned_security_lapses/articleshow/1994732.cms

Kanishka: Rajiv Gandhi had questioned security lapses

[3 May, 2007 l 0935 hrs IST PTI]

TORONTO: In a phone call just after the bombing of the Air India plane in 1985, the then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had asked his Canadian counterpart Brian Mulroney why all the baggage on the flight was not removed and re-checked in Montreal when three pieces were found to be suspicious.

Gandhi, a trained commercial pilot himself, had suggested to the Canadian PM
that Canada had breachedinternational procedures by not re-screening
the entire luggage on Flight 182.

Details of the emotionally charged exchange were revealed on Wednesday in declassified government documents released at the judicial inquiry probing the June 23, 1985 bombing that killed 329 people. A blast on the same day at Tokyo’s Narita Airport killed two.

A June 27 briefing document about the call says: “Overall impression was that Gandhi was highly excited, perturbed and concerned, but highly appreciative of the call.”

“After our PM related his sympathies and condolences, Gandhi said he understood three suitcases had been pulled from Air India flight in Montreal and his understanding was that when such a thing happened, it was standard [international] practice that all suitcases would be searched, but this had not been done in this case,” the document says.

“Our PM did not comment directly on this but went on to say that in response to Indian requests, we had made every effort to ensure safety of Indian diplomatic personnel and premises in Canada. We would redouble our protective efforts and prosecute to the full extent of the law anyone involved in illegal action,” National Post reported, quoting the documents.

The briefing note says Gandhi had already heard of the Narita bombing as well and the two prime ministers agreed it looked like there was a sinister connection.

The fact Mulroney first called Gandhi to express condolences on the loss of life on the plane when most of the passengers were Canadians has long been criticised.

But the intimate details of the conversation between the two former prime ministers sheds much more light on the response to what at the time was an unprecedented act of terrorism.

The briefing says that while Gandhi, a trained commercial pilot, was not directly questioning Canadian security measures before the bombing, “it is clear this question is implied.”

The document says Mulroney asked the staff to investigate Gandhi’s concerns about the baggage.

“Mulroney has asked Canadian authorities for a full report and we will relay that to Indian authorities,” says the memo, which was signed by an Ottawa official with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Another memo released at the inquiry describes a meeting on June 25, 1985 between Bartleman’s minister, Joe Clark, and S J S Chhatwal, the then Indian High Commissioner in Canada, about the bombing.

At the meeting, Clark said “he had for some time been very concerned about some activities within the Indian ethnic community in Canada involving extremist elements,” the document says.

“Clark said that he had personally talked with the President of India about this issue at the time of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s funeral and had stressed the importance of counteracting extremism.”

Talwinder Singh Parmar was a leader of Babbar Khalsa, an organization so deeply infiltrated by the Indian government that it was effectively under its control. (Remember, India Today reported that it was the Indian government itself that created the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.)

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/05/23/4202844-cp.html

CSIS wondered if Parmar was an Indian agent
By JIM BROWN

OTTAWA (CP) - Canada’s spy agency thought Talwinder Singh Parmar was probably a dangerous terrorist months before the 1985 Air India bombing - but it also toyed with an alternative theory that he could have been an agent provocateur working for the Indian government.

“He was an unknown (at the time),” Ray Kobzey, a former CSIS officer, testified Wednesday. “We needed to clarify what exactly we were dealing with here.”

Documents previously tabled at the inquiry headed by retired judge John Major show the Canadian Security Intelligence Service started trying in the fall of 1984 to get a wiretap warrant against Parmar, then head of the militant Babar Khalsa movement that preached armed struggle to win a homeland for Sikhs in northern India.

In support of the warrant application, CSIS pointed to inflammatory public speeches Parmar had made, threatening to kill “50,000 Hindus” and appealing to Sikhs to unite in the battle for independence.

Kobzey wrote at the time that Parmar should be considered “the most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country.”

But he also noted, in the material marshalled to support the wiretap warrant, that some sources in the Indo-Canadian community thought he was actually an agent of the Indian government intent on sowing discord.

That wasn’t as troubling as the possibility that he was plotting terrorist acts, Kobzey testified. But it was still a threat to Canadian national security.,

If Parmar had been an agent provocateur, he said, the danger would have been that he was “destabilizing the emigre community, creating problems within the community, fomenting unrest.”

The suggestion that Parmar was an agent of Indian intelligence, with a hidden agenda to discredit Sikhs, has long since been abandoned by virtually all students of the Air India bombing.

But the evidence at the inquiry shows CSIS hadn’t yet discarded the possibility when it began trying to get judicial authorization to tap his phone.

It turned out that it took five months to get the tap in place - not because of any resistance by the courts but because of bureaucratic problems within the security service.

The delay - previously noted by several witnesses - meant CSIS didn’t get the pipeline it wanted into Parmar’s activities until February 1985, four months before Air India Flight 182 was downed by a terrorist bomb.

It’s been an open question ever since whether speedier action to obtain the wiretap could have averted the tragedy.

Major observed Wednesday that there’s no way of knowing, but it could have given CSIS “a better chance of finding out at least what the gossip in that community was.

“Exactly” replied Kobzey. “It’s something that I’ve reflected on numerous times - the loss of that data, what did that mean in terms of the investigation and where it could have gone.”

Parmar, believed to have been the ringleader behind the bombing, left Canada after the attack and was never prosecuted. He was shot dead by police in India in 1992.

Harmail Singh Grewal was a career criminal who worked in a liquor store. Hardly a reliable person.

some sources in the Indo-Canadian community thought he was actually an agent of the Indian government intent on sowing discord.

Which he was.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Kanishka_probe_Parmar_was_suspected_as_an_Indian_agent/articleshow/2071277.cms

Kanishka probe: Parmar was suspected as an Indian agent
24 May, 2007 l 1222 hrs ISTlPTI

TORONTO: Months before the 1985 Air India bombing, Canada’s spy agency thought Talwinder Singh Parmar was probably a dangerous terrorist but it also toyed with an alternative theory that he could have been an agent provocateur working for the Indian government.

“He (Parmar was an unknown (at the time),” Ray Kobzey, a former CSIS officer, testified on Wednesday.

Parmar later emerged as the key figure in the bombing of the Kanishka flight on June 23, 1985, which killed 329 people.

Documents previously tabled at the inquiry headed by retired judge John Major show the Canadian Security Intelligence Service started trying in the fall of 1984 to get a wiretap warrant against Parmar, then head of the militant Babar Khalsa movement that preached armed struggle to win a homeland for Sikhs.

In support of the warrant application, CSIS pointed to inflammatory public speeches Parmar had made, threatening to kill “50,000 Hindus” and appealing to Sikhs to unite in the battle for independence. Kobzey wrote at the time that Parmar should be considered “the most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country.”

Please tell me how the Indian Consul Genral knew all about the inncident before the investigators did and before it was really public knowledge.

BTW, Rediff is an Indian -based news service which supports the government line as against the human-rights activists and others who criticize their treatment of minorities. It always justifies any atrocity committed by the Indian regime.

Rediff is a private-owned news service. It’s a lot more trust-able than all of the Khalistani propaganda piece you scripted above, in the main posts.

By the way, we’re all waiting for your magnanimous reply to this question:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1826324/posts?page=53#53

One funny thing is that Khalistanis claim only the Indian portion of Punjab, a country that has allowed a SIKH prime minister and SIKH chief of armed forces and an erstwhile SIKH president.

They are too scared to fight MUSLIM punjabis inspite of the fact that its much larger than the Indian side and is home to the Birth place of Guru Nanak.

We dont see Khalistanis fighting the Pakistani govt anywhere or even making a demand that they be separated. But they want to wage a war against democratic India so violently !

Indian sikhs are far too sensible to fall into this Khalistani trap, as they recognize the absurdity of the seperatist logic.

Whenever it’s a case of the government against the minorities, Rediff just about always takles the government’s side, no matter how egregious the act.

There are not many Sikhs left in Pakistani Punjab; they were relocated at the time of partition.

Further, the Pakistanis have been gracious in allowing the free movement of Sikhs from around the world, including the state of Punjab on the Indian side, to come to Nankana Sahib for the annual commemoration of guru Nanak, as well as for other events.

There are not many Sikhs left in Pakistani Punjab; they were relocated at the time of partition.

So you've been selectively ignorant about the forced conversions of Sikhs by the Muslims in Pakistan.

Further, the Pakistanis have been gracious in allowing the free movement of Sikhs from around the world, including the state of Punjab on the Indian side, to come to Nankana Sahib for the annual commemoration of guru Nanak, as well as for other events.

Yea, right. Lol!

Mann writes to Pakistan Embassy

Forced conversion of jailed Indian Sikhs

New Delhi, February 6

Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) President and Lok Sabha MP from Sangrur Simranjit Singh Mann has written to the Pakistan High Commission here expressing concern over forced conversion to Islam of some Sikh youths in Pakistan jails.

Mr Mann has requested the Deputy High Commissioner of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Mr Jilani, to allow one of the four Shiromani Gurdawara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) members of his party to visit jails in Pakistan where the Sikh youths have been kept. The Akali leader has requested Mr Jilani to grant SGPC members permission to use the land route through Wagah to verify the authenticity of news reports that Sikhs are being coaxed to convert to Islam. A member of the Consultative Committee, Ministry of External Affairs, Mr Mann has requested the Deputy High Commissioner to expeditiously repatriate 22 Sikhs from various jails in Pakistan to Punjab in India.

While drawing the attention of Mr Jilani to the plight of the youths languishing in jails in Kot Lakhpat and Quetta, Baluchistan, the Akali leader has stated that these youths have been duped by unscrupulous travel agents.

The letter also mentions names of youths from various places in Punjab. According to the list, Mahinder Pal Singh (Marnarian), Harminder Singh (Goraya village) and Kehar Singh (Begowal village) from Hoshiarpur district, Gurpreet Singh (Rounta village) and Kuldip Singh (Bhatnoora village) from Jalandhar disrict and Shiv Kumar from Kanour village in Nawanshahar are in the Kot Lakhpat jail. The 16 youths in Quetta jail belong to various districts in Punjab and Haryana. Names spelt out in the letter are as follows: Inderjit Singh from Brara Gurdev village and Sukhwinder Singh from Milk Shekha village in Ambala, Gurnam Singh from Gari Kanungon and Amarjeet Singh from Danowal Khurd villages in Hoshiarpur district, Gurmeet Singh from Timberpur village in Fatehgarh Sahib, Satnam Singh from Sohal district in Gurdaspur, Balwinder Singh from Nawarsi village in Kurukshetra, Karam Singh from Malliana village in Moga, Surjit Lal from Kataria village and Harmesh Singh in Jandel Khurad village in Nawan Shehar, Rajwinder Singh from Ajrawar in Patiala, Surjit Singh from Bakhli village, Surjit Singh from Talli village and Bachitar Singh from Pehowa, Rakesh Singh from Kashmir Garh and Surinder Singh from Mallan Wali village in Yamunanagar.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030207/nation.htm#1

Perhaps Simranjit Singh Mann has had a problem, but every year many Sikhs from all over the world gather in Nankana Sahib. I know Sikhs who go there whenever they can afford to do so, with absolutely no problems. They see Sikhs from Punjab there too.

Perhaps Mann’s problem isn’t that the Pakistanis won’t let him go, but that India won’t, considering that they have been doing thigns like arresting Mr. Mann for holding a peaceful protest at the statue of the repressive Beant Signh and making speeches and hoisting a flag in various peaceful marches.

Apparently, exercising your rights is a de facto crime in India.