By NNN-PTI
Toronto, Canada : After 16 months of marathon hearing, the inquiry into the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight that killed 329 people has ended with allegations surfacing of systemic racism in dealing with victims and inaction and infighting between Top Canadian securities agencies.
In the final day of evidence at the Ottawa inquiry on Friday, Commissioner John Major heard from a report by a University of Toronto sociologist that argued racism led to warnings being minimised before the bombing and responses to be less-than-adequate afterwards.
“When police, political and media elites all consistently treated the Air India bombings as a foreign event, it is not surprising that Canadians do not recall June 23, 1985. As a nation, we were not shaken, transformed and moved to change our own institutional practices for a tragedy we considered had little to do with us,” said the report by Prof Sherene Razack, which was entered as an exhibit by victims’ families.
Major also heard from Margaret Bloodworth, national security adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, about the tension between the RCMP, charged with collecting evidence and prosecuting terrorism cases, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
“I think the question of intelligence and evidence is without doubt the major issue,” Bloodworth, the last of the inquiry’s 214 witnesses, said. “I don’t pretend to have the answer. I am hoping this commission is going to have the answer.”