IN DEPTH: AIR INDIA
Crime Files: The Mole
CBC News Online | Updated August 27, 2003
Buried in a mass of new documents just released as part of the Air India case is a suggestion by the RCMP that Canada's spy agency, CSIS, had a mole close to the people allegedly plotting the Air India bombing.
The documents include a transcript of a meeting between the RCMP and one of the suspects, Ajaib Singh Bagri, the day after he was arrested in October of 2000 and charged with mass murder.
In that transcript, the RCMP lays out the case against him and tell Bagri that another member of the alleged bombing conspiracy was an agent for CSIS. The man named was Surjan Singh Gill, who at the time called himself the consul general of the non-existent independent Sikh state of Khalistan. Gill resigned from the Sikh extremist group, Babbar Khalsa, three days before the bombing.
Just days before the bombing, the documents suggest, CSIS knew the plot was getting serious and pulled its man out. Neither CSIS nor the RCMP had any comment on this and we don't know exactly what CSIS knew about the plot.
Gill was later arrested by the RCMP as a member of the bomb plot, though he was never charged and was able to quietly leave the country to live in London.
CSIS destroyed 150 wiretaps of the suspects made before and after the bombing, a destruction of evidence which has been characterized by the Crown attorney in court as "unacceptable negligence."
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Report from RCMP Inspector Gary Bass on the Air India investigation.
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Excerpts from a transcript of an RCMP interview with AJAIB SINGH BAGRI, 28 OCT 2000.
LORNE SCHWARTZ, R.C.M.P.: "Surjan Singh Gill was involved in this right from the start and was probably directed by certain people to stay involved and to learn what was going on." - pp 64 and 65
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"he's been told to distance himself from this test blast."
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"his agent handlers have told him, you better distance yourself from these people."
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SGT. JIM HUNTER, R.CM.P: "Surjan trying to back out ... And, of course, why's he trying to back out? Well, because his C.S.I.S. agents have told him to back out. They told him to get out of there. That things are happening and you can't be seen as part of that."
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