Air India allegedly raised concerns about bomb threats so often in the early 1980s, that officials believed the airline was simply trying to get extra police security at no cost, the Air India bombing inquiry heard Tuesday.

At a meeting of RCMP, Justice Department and Transport Canada officials in January 1986, officials discussed the concerns Air India supposedly raised before almost every flight that took off during a two-year period in the early 1980s.

The details of the meeting — which took place after Air India Flight 182 blew up in 1985 — were chronicled in a memo written by Warren Sweeney, a former RCMP intelligence analyst who testified at the inquiry in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoon.

Anil Kapoor, one of the lawyers for the inquiry, read the memo out during Sweeney's testimony.

"It was learned that every flight was preceded by a letter outlining a threat to Air India," Kapoor read. "It was thought by the people present [at the meeting] that this was Air India's way of having increased security for their flights at no cost to them."

Kapoor asked Sweeney if the memo was an accurate account of the meeting, and Sweeney said it was.

"Is that what everyone at the meeting thought?" Kapoor asked.

"Yes," responded Sweeney, who worked for the RCMP's national criminal intelligence branch from 1984 to 1986.

The inquiry is probing the investigation that followed the bombing of Flight 182, which blew up over the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, while flying from Canada to India. All 329 people on board were killed.

A separate luggage bomb meant for another Air India flight killed two Japanese baggage handlers at a Tokyo airport.

Air India denies regular warnings were issued

The meeting Sweeney detailed in his memo was called as government lawyers were busy preparing for an anticipated flood of lawsuits from victims' families, the inquiry learned.

Soma Ray-Ellis, the lawyer representing Air India at the inquiry, said the memo gives the wrong perception about the number of threats the airline reported to officials.

"From 1982 to 1985, there were 17 instances," she said. "That certainly doesn't qualify as every week. This is an attempt to explain away why they were not successful at doing their job."

Earlier Tuesday, the inquiry heard of a warning sent from Air India to its international affiliates, including Toronto and Montreal, a warning that talked of a possible hijacking.

John Henry, a former CSIS intelligence analyst, testified at the inquiry that such information would have needed corroboration before it was considered a definite threat.
 
"It's leading in that direction. It is a threat. All threats had to be viewed, whether we thought they were valid or not," he said.
 
"And this would be certainly, one that would be followed up verbally with the Sikh desk to see what they had. However … the indication of the hijacking, we would want corroboration of some kind before we became definitive in saying it was a definite threat."
 
Henry, who ran CSIS's threat assessment unit, said the general threat to Indian interests in Canada — including Air India — remained high in the year before the disaster.
 
A "high" level threat meant to "more or less expect anything," he said.

Caller warns of Air India sabotage

During Henry's testimony, the inquiry also heard of an RCMP memo detailing a June 15, 1985, phone call to the Air India ticket office in Toronto.
 
A caller, identified as a soft-spoken Indian male in his 20s, warned that an Air India aircraft was to be sabotaged, but gave no further specifics. The caller, who wouldn't leave any contact information, said he wanted to pass along the information because his friends and family members used the airline.
 
Such information would have been passed along in CSIS for analysis and entered in the agency's internal communications system, Henry said. 

The public inquiry, which started in 2006, resumed on April 30, 2007, after a lengthy delay. It was called because the Air India investigation and prosecution was the costliest and longest in Canadian history — yet led to no murder convictions.

Only one person was ever convicted. Inderjit Singh Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2003 and received a five-year sentence.

The suspected mastermind of the plot, Talwinder Singh Parmar, died in India in 1992. The RCMP's two main surviving suspects were both acquitted in March 2005, after a 19-month trial.