Family members of the victims of the Air India bombing say they were shocked to learn that the RCMP received information warning of a possible imminent attack in the days leading up to the bombing.
They have been pushing for more than two decades to find out what happened in the days leading up to the deadly mid-air bombing.
On Thursday, Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman testified that the RCMP received information from an electronic intercept suggesting a flight had been targeted for the coming weekend.
He told the public inquiry that he tried to bring the information to the attention of his superiors, but it was ignored.
Dr. Bal Gupta, chair of the Air India Victims' Families Association, said the testimony supported the families' longstanding request to know exactly what the authorities did or didn't know at the time.
But he said that although the information backed up the families' argument, it was devastating news.
"It was a combination of surprise, shock and later, as it sank in, it revived the grief which we have been living with for the last 22 years," Gupta told CTV's Canada AM on Friday. He lost his wife Ramwati Gupta in the bombing.
"I was surprised because I never expected to hear a thing like that during the inquiry. I was shocked that nothing was done and the reaction to information provided by Mr. Bartleman to RCMP, the way it was received. And then I told my son, my God, this tragedy could have been averted, as we have suspected for the last 22 years."
Prakash Sahu, who lost a father, stepbrother and stepsister on the flight, told The Globe and Mail the new testimony was shocking.
"It's absolutely incredible," Sahu told The Globe. "This makes a mockery of what the RCMP were doing."
Another family member of a victim, Rattan Kalsi, who lost his 21-year-old daughter Indira in the bombing, said he was upset it took so long for someone to say publicly what many family members believed for so many years.
"They should have solved this long ago," he told The Globe from London, Ont.
The Air-India flight was travelling from Canada to India via England when it exploded over the Atlantic Ocean on June 23, 1985, killing 329 passengers and crew.
Despite the fact that most of the passengers were Canadian, the federal government refused to establish an inquiry into the disaster until last year because it said the Mounties' investigation was still underway.
The lawyer for the families, Jacques Shore, agreed Thursday's testimony was unexpected and shocking. But he said it provided new momentum for the families who have long argued that "not everything that should have been done was done," Shore told Canada AM on Friday.
"This for us, I think, as counsel demonstrates that we have to dig deeper, ask more questions, determine exactly why it was that information was not properly shared between the security intelligence agencies, between the police departments and, frankly, the RCMP," Shore said.
Bartleman, who was head of the intelligence and security branch at Foreign Affairs in 1985, said Thursday the information suggested Air India would be targeted on the upcoming weekend, which was indeed the same weekend Flight 182 was bombed.
Bartleman told the public inquiry that the electronic intercept, which came from the top-secret Communications Security Establishment -- an arm of the Defence Department -- was "raw, unevaluated" intelligence that hadn't been checked out.
He took the written report to an RCMP officer, whose name he cannot recall, and asked if he had seen it.
"His reaction startled me. He flushed and told me that of course he had seen it, and that he didn't need me to tell him how to do his job," Bartleman recounted.
Four days later, on June 23, 1985, the Air India flight was blown up. All 329 people on board died.
Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh said the ignored warnings and lack of action were a result of racism.
"I generally believe if you had 329 white Anglo-Saxons killed in an Air India disaster, you would have had an inquiry in no time," he said.
Gupta said that may be true, but it's time to move forward.
"I said something to similar effect in '86 on CBC National, but let's not beat a dead horse. Let's find the facts," he told Canada AM.
The Justice Department has said it hasn't been able to locate any such intelligence report or to corroborate Bartleman's story with any other potential witness.
Assassination threat
Bartleman's testimony came on the same day that a document filed to the inquiry suggested Sikh extremists may have threatened to assassinate former prime minister Brian Mulroney in the wake of the Air India bombing.
A memo from a senior RCMP officer to a top CSIS officer, sent just over a year after the bombing, expresses concern that the arrest of suspected bombing mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar and some of his associates could increase tensions.
The memo says that one week earlier the Canadian government received an unsigned letter threatening to kill Mulroney and "blast" the Toronto subway system and other targets unless Palmer and the others were freed.
The writer never made good on the threat, and Parmar was eventually freed after a trial on weapons and conspiracy charges.
With reports from CTV's Craig Oliver and The Canadian Press
