OTTAWA - A retired RCMP officer says former diplomat James Bartleman never delivered any warning to him that an Air India plane was about to come under attack in the week leading up to the 1985 bombing.
"If he would have called me out of a meeting to talk to me, I would have remembered that,'' Lloyd Hickman told a public inquiry Monday. "He did not. I had no conversation with him.''
Bartleman, now lieutenant-governor of Ontario, shocked the inquiry earlier this month when he testified that he saw an electronic intercept, around June 18, 1985, indicating an Air India flight could be targeted by terrorists the coming weekend.
He said he took the information down the hall, where an interdepartmental meeting was gong on at Foreign Affairs headquarters, pulled a "senior'' RCMP officer aside and asked if he had seen the material.
Bartleman said the Mountie replied that he had indeed seen the threat -- and that he didn't need any help doing his job.
Hickman said he was the senior RCMP representative at the meeting held at the Foreign Affairs building that day, but he's sure he never spoke to Bartleman.
Furthermore, he said, he wouldn't have snapped back at any high-ranking diplomatic official who tried to share intelligence with him. That could have been a "career-ending move,'' said Hickman.
He isn't the first to question Bartleman's recollection of the matter.
Gordon Smith, then an associate deputy minister at Foreign Affairs, has testified that he never saw any similar intelligence and he believes Bartleman's memory is playing tricks on him.
Richard Muir, a retired RCMP superintendent, has also told the inquiry he never had any conversation with Bartleman in the days leading up to June 23, 1985, when Air India Flight 182 was downed by a terrorist bomb with the loss of 329 lives.
The inquiry has since moved on to other topics, including the level of airport security -- an issue that continued to spark controversy Monday.
Former Supreme Court justice John Major, the head of the commission, took Air India to task at the start of the day's proceedings for trying to keep some of its security operations from public view.
Major said Air India may be a state-owned enterprise, but that doesn't give it any special status to claim exemption form public disclosure on grounds of national security or international relations.
The retired judge wants lawyers for the airline and the Canadian government to go back and review documents to be tabled later this week, with a view to releasing more material.
Major also criticized Air India's counsel, Toronto lawyer Soma Ray-Ellis, for a media interview in which she claimed the airline was being scapegoated at the inquiry.
Ray-Ellis is free to hold that view, but she should make her arguments at the hearings, not to journalists, said Major.
