The prime accused in the Kanishka bombing case had warned his supporters in early 1988 not to betray him by revealing about his involvement in the Air India bombing, a public inquiry into the incident has been told.
'If someone implicates me or gets me arrested for planting the bomb, that person would have been an insider,' Talwinder Singh Parmar reportedly said in the intelligence tape recording.
The gathering at Parmar's Burnaby house was surreptitiously recorded by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which passed the information to the RCMP and revealed it publicly for the first time on Thursday at the Ottawa inquiry.
The apparent admission of responsibility came three weeks after Inderjit Singh Reyat was charged in February 1988 in the Narita bombing on June 23, 1985, which occurred less than an hour before AI Flight 182 was blown out of the sky.
Both bombs were traced back to a group of Sikh separatists headed by Parmar.
Former CSIS officer Mervin Grierson said all those who listened to the statement said Parmar was basically warning those in his inner circle.
"We thought it was fairly significant that in a meeting like that he would make a statement like that," Grierson testified.
"In our interpretation, he was basically saying: 'If I am arrested for putting that bomb... that quite clearly somebody in this room would have had to have told some body'."
Grierson said the meeting at Parmar's house was also unusual. He was cut off by inquiry lawyer Mark Freiman before identifying who else was in attendance.
"There was a group of very significant Sikh militants that he called together for this," Grierson said, adding, "At that particular time that was very unusual for him to have a group like that meeting at his house. It was a significant departure."
Parmar fled to India a few months later, where he was killed in 1992. The Parmar intercept was not used during the trial of two men for the AI bombing, which ended in acquittals in 2005.
Grierson, who was based in the BC region at the time, said he passed the information to the Mounties immediately, even though he later got slammed by his superiors at headquarters for not consulting them first.
Grierson said the RCMP was always critical of the lack of information sharing by CSIS, but that Canada's spy agency was as cooperative as it could be while still preserving its own role in intelligence-gathering.
There were times when CSIS lost valuable sources in the Sikh community after agents were forced to pass them over to the RCMP, Grierson submitted before the Commission headed by Justice John Major.
An example of that was a source dubbed Mr A, who had promised to provide important evidence about the Air India bombing in exchange for anonymity and a reward.
Both Grierson and Mr A's handler, former CSIS agent Neil Eshleman, said he was among the best sources the agency had on Sikh extremism.
No specific details of what Mr A told CSIS were revealed, but it was described as 'specific information with respect to the bombing that can be corroborated' in a report.
