OTTAWA - No bomb-sniffing dog was on duty in Toronto on the weekend of the 1985 Air India bombing because the RCMP had sent every such canine it had on a training course, a public inquiry has heard.
That left the baggage loaded on to ill-fated Flight 182 to be screened by an electronic detector that had failed a test six months earlier.
Gary Carlson, the former RCMP dog handler at Toronto's Pearson airport, testified Tuesday that he told Air India, following the January test, that the hand-held device known as a PD-4 wasn't good enough.
He also told the airline that he and his dog Thor would be available any time they were needed to check suspicious luggage.
But Carlson and Thor were in Vancouver for a week-long training session on June 22, 1985, when the terrorist bomb planted in the baggage of Flight 182 went undetected and 329 people died.
"All the bomb dogs from across the country were there,'' Carlson told the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major.
"At that time we only had five or six dogs in the whole country that were trained for explosives.''
There was no backup dog at Pearson because, in those days, other police forces in the Toronto to area didn't have canine teams capable of explosives work.
The standard procedure, in the absence of a dog, would have been to hand search any baggage that was considered suspect, Carlson testified.
It's known, however, that there were no hand searches that weekend at Pearson. In addition, an X-ray machine broke down and Burns Security, the firm hired by Air India to screen its baggage, had to resort to the electronic sniffer that had failed its initial trial at the start of the year.
Carlson said the hand-held PD-4 could not detect gunpowder at any distance greater than one inch from a test cache of the substance. It failed to register anything at all, no matter what the distance, when tested on plastic explosives.
The Mounties did have a drug-sniffing dog on duty at Pearson the weekend of the bombing, but that animal hadn't been trained for explosives detection. Even today, said Carlson, only 10 to 15 per cent of the force's dogs specialize in bomb-detection.
"One might say we are a little bit more focused on crime with respect to drugs than potentially suspected terrorist activity,'' observed Jacques Shore, a lawyer for the families of the Air India victims.
"Or another way of saying it is that there's a lot more drugs out there than there are bombs'' shot back Carlson.
Previous testimony has disclosed that a Quebec provincial police dog handler was called to screen Flight 182 when it made a stop later at Montreal's Mirabel Airport.
But Serge Carignan, the now-retired officer in question, stunned the inquiry last week by saying the plane had already taken off by the time he got to Mirabel, leaving him to check only three suspect suitcases that had been pulled aside during passenger-boarding and left behind. The three bags turned out to be harmless.
Carlson, for his part, found his attendance at the training course in Vancouver was abruptly cut short after the Air India plane went down the next day off the coast of Ireland. He was immediately recalled to resume his normal duties.
"I boarded the next CP Air flight straight back to Toronto,'' he told the inquiry.
Gary Clarke, the former officer in charge of RCMP protective policing for Ontario, called it "an unfortunate set of circumstances'' that all the force's bomb dogs had been off work at the same time.
But he insisted Air India could have asked the Mounties to conduct hand searches of its baggage after encountering trouble with the X-ray machine and the PD-4 sniffer. The force had set up a team of specially trained officers -- including some from the Peel regional force where Pearson is located -- who could be called in for such searches.
"I really think that perhaps Air India should have taken some other precautions to check the bags,'' said Clarke. "Hindsight is a wonderful teacher (but) if Air India said that all the bags in Toronto will be examined, they might have prevented it .''
The issue of who had ultimate responsibility for airport security has long been a bone of contention among the RCMP, Transport Canada, Air India and Burns Security.
The bombing has been blamed on Sikh extremists campaigning for a homeland in northern India, but only one man has ever ben convicted. Another was shot dead by police in India in 1992 and two more were acquitted at trial in Vancouver two years ago.
