A former police officer says he believes he could have found explosives on Flight 182, but the plane had already left a Montreal airport by the time he arrived to check it, the Air India inquiry heard Wednesday.

Serge Carignan, who was a police dog handler, said the doomed Air India flight left a Montreal airport before he arrived to search it. 'I believe we would have found … the explosives.'
(CBC)

Serge Carignan — a former dog handler with Quebec's provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec — told the inquiry in Ottawa that he was called to Mirabel airport on June 22, 1985, hours before a bomb blew the flight out of the sky and killed 329 people.

Carignan said he was told officials needed help searching a plane and luggage, and that the airport's regular RCMP explosives dog was out of the region on that date. By the time Carignan arrived at the airport roughly 45 minutes later, the plane had already taken off, he told the inquiry.

Carignan said he didn't know why the plane departed before he got to the airport.

"I've always wondered why, if I was called to search an airplane and some luggage … why did they let the airplane go before I arrived there," said Carignan.

"I did not have a chance to search that airplane. I believe that if I had a chance to search it, things might have turned out differently," he said. "I believe we would have found … the explosives."

No explosives found

Carignan and his sniffer dog, Arko, were taken to an airport bunker, where they searched three pieces of luggage that had been taken from the plane because they were considered suspicious.

Serge Carignan appears with scent dog Arko in an undated photo.
(Courtesy of Serge Carignan)

The dog didn't find any explosives, said Carignan.

Flight 182 stopped in Montreal after leaving Toronto, en route to London's Heathrow Airport and then India. The explosives — allegedly planted by Sikh extremists in luggage that was loaded in Vancouver — exploded off the west coast of Ireland and killed everyone on board, mostly Canadians.

Carignan said he wasn't told of a specific warning during the phone call.

"I was not told that it was a bomb threat. I took it upon myself when I did receive the call that it was a bomb threat," he said.

"It would make no sense, I suppose, to call the bomb-detecting dog and his handler unless that was the suspicion?" asked John Major, the retired Supreme Court justice who heads the inquiry.

"That's correct, sir," Carignan said.

The public inquiry, which started in 2006 and resumed after lengthy delays on April 30, 2007, is focusing on whether there were security and intelligence failures in the investigation that followed the bombing and a related one that killed two baggage handlers in Tokyo.

RCMP report not true, says Carignan

Carignan discounted official reports from the RCMP and Transport Canada that were provided during Bob Rae's earlier probe into the disaster. The reports said bomb-sniffing dogs checked Air India flights before they left Toronto and Montreal.

"It is not true. I did not screen the flight. The only work I did was search these three suitcases," said Carignan.

Carignan said when sniffer dogs are used, cargo is usually removed from the plane and spread out on the tarmac, which didn't happen that night.

"I would have expected to do that that evening," he said.

Rae told CBC News Wednesday after Carignan's testimony that it was "a nightmare of frustration" for Canadians to hear the attack could have been prevented, but wasn't.

"My concern is that I think everyone has to come to terms with the fact that this was a preventable attack and on the day in question everything that could go wrong, did go wrong," said Rae, who has worked closely with the families of Air India victims.

"That's what makes it such an impossible thing for people to live with."

Rae did not want to comment on specific details on the inquiry, as it is still continuing.

"We have to let the inquiry do its work," he said.

Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh said contradictions with the RCMP and Transport Canada reports are alarming.

"All of these contradictions are the making of a coverup," Dosanjh told CBC News on Wednesday. "This is now more than casual indifference."

Painful testimony: victims' families

Carignan said he was never contacted by police following the disaster and was asked to be a witness at the inquiry after his wife contacted inquiry staff last week.

Bal Gupta, who lost his wife, Rama, on the flight and is chair of the Air India Victims' Families Association, thanked Carignan for his testimony, although he said it was painful to hear.

"We suspected something like that, but what surprises me is that nobody after this tragedy ever contacted Mr. Carignan," Gupta told CBC News on Wednesday. 

He also said it showed there are still more people who have a lot to explain about that night.

"Why did the RCMP let the plane go when there was suspected baggage?" he said. "My gut feeling is that there are at least a dozen other people … who know."

The inquiry was called because the Air India investigation and prosecution was the costliest and one of the longest in Canadian history — yet led to no murder convictions.

Investigators believe the bomb plot was carried out by extremists who wanted India to create an independent Sikh homeland.

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

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