OTTAWA - The RCMP largely ignored the expertise of local police in dealing with the Vancouver Sikh community in the aftermath of the 1985 Air India bombing, a public inquiry has been told.
Don McLean, a former municipal constable who had spent two years as a liaison officer with the community, testified Tuesday that he wasn't impressed by some of the Mounties' investigative techniques in the weeks following the attack.
"They used your usual police methods of going and knocking on doors an presenting themselves as police officers,'' McLean told the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major.
"(They) expected to get information that way. There was a lot of resistance to that from the community. They would prefer to talk to us.''
McLean said he worked no more than a month and a half with the RCMP after Flight 182 was downed by a terrorist bomb, advising the federal force on the intelligence he had gathered, the contacts he had made and the confidential sources he had developed prior to the attack.
But he said he soon became no more than a token figure in the joint task force investigating the bombing, and felt his presence was mainly symbolic -- to allow the RCMP to claim it was utilizing local knowledge.
"I became the Uncle Tom, so to speak . . . Then they continued on with their own investigation in their own direction.''
McLean also said information-gathering after the attack was complicated by the presence of Indian government intelligence agents who were active in the Sikh community.
The agents worked for the Research and Analysis Wing, one of India's several intelligence services, he said. Among other things, they operated a "disinformation'' campaign and tried to buy off community newspapers and induce them to toe the Indian government line.
"Our sources informed us that they (each) had $10,000 Canadian that they used . . . to influence the local newspapers. On a couple of occasions we became aware of an actual change in rhetoric, from being very supportive of the (Sikh) extremist viewpoint, changing over to the moderate.''
McLean said he complained, in a written report to his superiors, about the activities of the Indian agents but, to his knowledge, no action was taken against them.
It's long been known the Canadian Security Intelligence Service believed Indian agents were operating in Canada and feared that their actions could destabilize the Sikh community. To date, however, the inquiry has heard little evidence on the subject.
McLean's appearance Tuesday was not the first time he has testified. He revealed earlier this month that Vancouver police eavesdropped on a meeting, less than two weeks before the bombing, where Sikh militants spoke of doing something "serious'' to publicize their cause.
At the time, however, officers thought the most likely targets were the Indian consulate in the city or the diplomats posted there -- not Air India.
Flight 182, which departed Toronto and Montreal on June 22, 1985, went down off the coast of Ireland early the morning of June 23.
The bombing was blamed on Sikh separatists using British Columbia as a base in their campaign to win a homeland in northern India. But only one man has ever been convicted for his role in the plot. Another was shot dead by police in India in 1992 and two more were acquitted at trial in Vancouver in 2005.
