Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan says she won't rush to call a public inquiry into how security agencies investigated the 1985 Air India bombings.

"At this point, it's not possible for me to say ... that there would be a benefit from a public inquiry," McLellan told reporters in Edmonton on Wednesday, after two suspects were acquitted on eight murder and conspiracy charges.

She was speaking shortly after British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ian Bruce Josephson delivered his verdict acquitting Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri.

Anne McLellan comments on the not guilty verdicts in the Air India bombing.
Anne McLellan comments on the not guilty verdicts in the Air India bombing.

The judge said he didn't find key witnesses credible, but also cited "unacceptable negligence" on the part of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Family members of the 329 people who died when Flight 182 blew up off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, have been calling for such an inquiry.

They accuse CSIS and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of bungling the case against Malik, a wealthy Vancouver-area businessman, and Bagri, a sawmill worker from Kamloops.

"There must be a public inquiry," said Susheel Gupta, an Ottawa lawyer who was 12 when his mother died on board Air India Flight 182.

"Canadians deserve that, the victims deserve that ... There was obviously a failure in all the agencies that were supposed to protect us."

Judge cites 'unacceptable negligence' by CSIS

While reading his verdict, Josephson took time to criticize CSIS for destroying what could have been key evidence in the case. He called the erasing of hundreds of hours of wiretap conversations involving key suspects "unacceptable negligence."

Some of the tapes were destroyed because a former CSIS agent feared the identity of Sikh informants would be revealed when they were handed over to the RCMP.

Others were erased, possibly without ever being listened to, because the agency routinely destroys such tapes after a specific period of time.

The fact that some conversations were taped three months before the day of the bombings led some relatives to wonder if the tragedy might have been prevented with better intelligence work.

They are also upset at the revelation that agents following Talwinder Singh Parmar and Inderjit Singh Reyat into a forested area on Vancouver Island three weeks before the bombing heard a loud bang in the distance.

Parmar, the plot's alleged mastermind, was killed in India in 1992. Reyat was twice convicted of explosives and manslaughter charges in connection with the two Air India bombings.

The two men were conducting a test explosion to make sure their bombs would work, the Crown later suggested in court.

Minister suggests little more can be learned

On Wednesday, McLellan said the independent Security Intelligence Review Committee has already reviewed CSIS's handling of the investigation.

She attributed any faults in how the Air India case was tackled to the fact that it was a new agency and still trying to determine how its role in national security investigations meshed with the role of the RCMP.

"Obviously, things have changed dramatically in the past 20 years," she said. "I would have to be convinced that after a year of evidence and over 120 witnesses, that there was anything further to be learned [by a public inquiry]."

McLellan said CSIS is now one of the most respected intelligence-gathering agencies in the world, but critics nonetheless say the case has given the country a black eye.

Canada 'open to terrorists': Indo-Canadian politician

"This sends a message to the rest of the world: Canada is open for terrorists," said Dave Hayer, a member of the provincial legislature who was also in the courtroom for the verdict.

"In Canada you can blow up an airplane, kill innocent human beings and nothing will happen to you."

Hayer's father, journalist and publisher Tara Singh Hayer, was assassinated in 1998 after telling police he had heard Bagri confess his involvement in the plot.

B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant said he understood Hayer's reaction, but defended the way Crown prosecutors handled the case.

Plant said they did a great job on what was probably the most complex criminal prosecution in Canadian history.

"It's harder on days like today for some people to stand up and take pride in our justice system," he said. "I know there's a sense that there's a real sense of incompleteness for many people here, because we know that something terrible happened. We don't know who did it. And that is a challenge."

McLellan, when asked whether she thought the acquittal would send a message that Canada cannot successfully prosecute terrorism cases, pointed to what she called unpreventable attacks in the United States, Spain and Beslan, Russia.

"Tragedies can happen in any country ...," she said. "The world's only superpower had to confront this horror on Sept. 11, [2001]."