A former cleaner at Toronto's Pearson airport on Wednesday rejected claims of tight security around a doomed Air India flight back in 1985, telling an inquiry he freely roamed around the aircraft — even sitting in the captain's chair — hours before the flight took off.

Brian Simpson testified at the inquiry into the disaster that he worked on the afternoon of June 22, 1985, hours before Flight 182 blew up off the coast of Ireland en route from Canada to India. The bombing killed all 329 people on board, most of them Canadians.

Air India Flight 182 Inquiry Commissioner John Major presides over public hearings in Ottawa Tuesday, July 18, 2006.
(Canadian Press/Jonathan Hayward)

Simpson, now a lawyer in St. Catharines, Ont., said he likely arrived for his shift at 3 p.m. or 3:30 p.m. and started walking down to the international departures lounge.

He said he used the airside corridor, an employee hallway that runs the length of the airport with access to departure lounges on one side and to the bridges connected to the aircrafts on the other.

Simpson said he spotted the tail fin of Air India, which had arrived in Toronto from India, via London. Out of curiosity, he said he wanted to see how dirty a jumbo jet would be after a lengthy international flight.

"What very often happens is that you want to see what certain aircraft look like when they come in and how dirty they will be, and, if you want, avoid working that flight," he said.

No guards in sight

Simpson said he walked up to the bridge door, punched in the security code, walked down the bridge and entered the aircraft — all without seeing any police or security guards.

"I went down to the tail end, around the back galley, probably checked a washroom or two and then came up into the first class area," said Simpson. "I went … into the cockpit, sat in the captain's chair, enjoyed the view … then I left the aircraft."

Simpson said no one else was in the bridge or on the plane during his 10-minute visit and no security officials challenged him for identification.

'I saw no one on that aircraft.'—Inquiry witness Brian Simpson

"I saw no one on that aircraft," said Simpson, who said he wouldn't have bothered checking the plane if he noticed a heavy security presence.

"If I had seen something out of ordinary … uniformed police, you would notice these things. You would notice different security guards."

Simpson's testimony refutes RCMP, Air India and Transport Canada documents that said security officials — either RCMP officers or guards from private firm Burns Security — were posted at the entrance to the bridge from the time the plane landed until it left.

Simpson also testified that airport employees didn't always close the bridge doors and sometimes wrote the door lock combinations on the walls next to the keypads.

Witness challenged

Simpson, who worked at the airport throughout his high school and university years, said he felt compelled to contact the Air India commission several days ago after hearing testimony about the increased security measures on board the aircraft.

"I kept hearing over and over again about security. It annoyed me. There was none," said Simpson.

Loretta Colton, a lawyer for the federal government, directly challenged Simpson's testimony that there was no security on board the plane or at the bridge.

She cited RCMP interviews with Air Canada cleaning crews and Burns Security representatives, completed shortly after the disaster, who said there were security officials on the plane.

"I suggest your memory may be wrong," said Colton.

"I do not accept that suggestion," said Simpson.

The luggage carrying the bomb on Flight 182 and another suitcase bomb that killed two baggage handlers at a Tokyo airport were originally loaded at Vancouver International Airport.

Investigators believe the bombings were 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.

Wanted to see who he was

Meanwhile, Canada's spy agency considered the idea that Parmar was an agent working for the Indian government, the inquiry heard Wednesday.

"He was an unknown [at the time]," Ray Kobzey, a former CSIS officer, testified. "We needed to clarify what exactly we were dealing with here."

CSIS had been trying to get judicial authorization to tap the phone of Parmar in the fall of 1984, believing he was a dangerous militant.

Parmar was the head of the militant Babar Khalsa movement that preached armed struggle to win a homeland for Sikhs in northern India. He made public speeches threatening to kill "50,000 Hindus" and appealing to Sikhs to unite in the battle for independence.

But there were some sources in the Indo-Canadian community that thought he was actually an agent of the Indian government intent on sowing discord.

That wasn't as troubling as the possibility that he was plotting terrorist acts, Kobzey testified. But it was still a threat to Canadian national security.

If Parmar had been an agent provocateur, he said, the danger would have been that he was "destabilizing the emigre community, creating problems within the community, fomenting unrest."

With files from the Canadian Press