In a stunning admission the RCMP says it can no longer properly protect the star witness in the Air India case because of media coverage of the trial.

The woman is in the witness protection program and can't be identified by court order. But artist's sketches have been used that depict the woman's appearance and a newspaper published the woman's first name.

On Wednesday, the police asked the court to ban all coverage of her remaining testimony against accused bomber Ripudaman Singh Malik.

Ripudaman Singh Malik (file photo)

Jeff Hayes, the lawyer for the RCMP, seemed almost astonished as he waved a piece of paper before Justice Ian Bruce Josephson.

Hayes claims it is yet another breach of the ban to protect the identity of the key witness. It was a print-out of the Canwest Global website, showing a sketch of the witness.

In it, her hair style, her hair color and her stature are clear. Those sketches are banned. Last week Justice Josephson went so far as to order media outlets to delete anything on their hard drives "including web pages, any tape that could be reused, any illustration of the protected witnesses."

The Canwest Global image would make the fifth breach of the order since the witness began testifying a week and a half ago, including one where an Indo-Canadian newspaper used her first name.

Spokesman for the Crown, Geoff Gaul, says the prosecution has had enough. "The time for trust and goodwill is over. The acts were careless, and reckless."

Gaul says the ban on identifying the witness was not sought lightly. The ban is there to protect the woman whose life could be in danger if certain people discover who she is.

He says the media's carelessness has put her safety at risk. "Once an identity has been disclosed, it is something that is very difficult, if even possible, to correct."

The judge has encouraged the Crown to consider contempt of court charges against the media outlets that broke the ban. But he rejected the request from the RCMP to ban reporters from writing anything more about the woman's testimony.

Meanwhile, cross-examination of the witness continued on Wednesday. The defence pressed hard for the witness to remember the exact words Malik used when he allegedly confided in her his involvement in the bombing of Air India Flight 182.

Malik is on trial in B.C. Supreme Court, along with co-accused Ajaib Singh Bagri. The two men are accused of planning the 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329 people, most of them Canadian. They are also accused of another bombing, the same day, that killed two baggage handlers in Japan.

In spite of hours of questioning the woman would not be shaken: she insisted Malik told her, "We had Air India crashed."