Ottawa: A witness in the 20-year-old Kanishka plane (Air India Flight 182) crash trial on Tuesday claimed that Canada was warned of a plot to bomb an Air India jetliner months before the attack, but police failed to act on the information.
The witness, testifying behind a curtain to protect his identity, told a government inquiry in Ottawa that police didn't believe his 1984 warning that Sikh terrorists were planning to attack the airline.
He admitted to having a criminal history and said he approached police after being offered $200,000 to plant a bomb on an aircraft. But the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has long denied it had any advance warning of an attack being planned.
However, he denied that any money ever changed hands and the plan was not carried out.
All 329 people on board the Kanishka plane died in the blast after it exploded off Ireland's coast. The dead included 280 Canadian citizens, most of them of Indian origin or descent.
He said he only agreed to meet with the terrorists to gather information for law-enforcement authorities. He said he warned both the Vancouver Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about the plot.
"When my wife told me there was a plane that had been blown up from Air India, I knew they (had) succeeded," the witness told the inquiry, headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major.
The man was not identified at the hearing Monday. In the past, a man identified as Gerry Boudreault has told a similar story.
Canada started an inquiry in September to find whether Canadian police and security officers did all they could to prevent the bombing of Air India Flight 182 from Toronto to London.
Relatives of Kanishka victims demanded the inquiry after a two-year trial ended in acquittals of the accused - Indian-born Sikhs, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri- in March 2005.
Supreme Court Justice Ian Josephson had ruled there was not enough evidence against them.
A third man in the case, Inderjit Singh Reyat, pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter and was sentenced to five years in jail in 2003 after a plea bargain in which he was supposed to testify against Malik and Bagri. Instead, he infuriated the court when he took the stand and claimed to know nothing.
Another witness, former Vancouver policeman Rick Crook, testified on Monday that he spoke to an informer in October 1984 who proposed to blow the whistle on a plane bombing conspiracy in exchange for lenient treatment on unrelated criminal charges.
(With inputs from AP)
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