Lest someone think we are immune to security concerns here in Canada let me assure you we are not.
The case in point would be the Air India disaster. This was back in the day when acts of terrorism were still called disasters.
On June 23, 1985 this flight from Canada to the UK blew apart in the air 45 minutes from Heathrow. All 329 passengers and crew were killed.
In the 22 years since this act of terrorism a number of facts have come out: the plane was blown apart by Sikh extremists; the RCMP bungled the investigation and while arrests were made in the case there have been few convictions; there were signs that a bombing was planned . . .
Recently a commission has been reviewing the case and trying to find out what went wrong. As is often the case in such situations, startling revelations have been made.
We have hear a senior government official declared that he came upon data which indicated that this particular flight was a target. He passed this information on and nothing was done about it. How troubling is this? You have suspicions that something is going to happen but you ignore them?
Just the other day we heard that a bomb sniffing dog had been dispatched to check out the plane (OK< perhaps the suspicions were acted upon on some level) however by the time the dog and his handler had arrived at the airport the plane had already been cleared for take off. The handler and dog arrived to examine the plane as it taxied to the runway. Of course there is no way of knowing if the dog would have detected the bomb but if he had 329 people would not have died.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing of course, but it is troubling that so often acts of terror could have been prevented if the systems in place had just worked the way they were intended to.
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