The Air India incident has long been dubbed by many as an international “whose done it”. The finger pointing never stops at any level, from who was responsible for the bombings, to who was responsible for mucking up the investigation. Personally, I’ve always ascribed to the Soft Target view as published by Globe and Mail journalists in contrast to the CBC’s take on things, but had little in way of public record to support that angle. However a recent confession of sorts by the very officer directly involved in bringing down Parmar seems to have turned the tide of things.

The officer, DSP Harmail Singh Chandi, recently came forward and basically acknowledged the following as being fact:

1. Parmar was killed while in police custody after having been arrested held and interrogated for five days.

   All the official reports which have Parmar being killed in a old western style shoot ‘em up.
   

2. Evidence was gathered, audio tapes, written confessions, but were destroyed at the bequest of higher ups in the Government in an effort to protect those involved, particularly to remove any trace of Government involvement.

   Acknowledges the fact that the Indian Government had direct involvement in the Air India Bombings
   

3. In Parmar’s confessions, he singled out Lakhwinder Singh Brar (head of the ISYF) as being the brains behind the operation.

   This would pit Brar, who some had suspected and accused of being GOI, as having a direct role and thereby being responsible for the AI Bombings. Also due to the alleged government protection of Lakhwinder Singh, by association dub him to be a Governments official, acting on their behalf. Or as many others have come to say it, claiming him to be a ‘Go-erment Da Bunda’.

The fact that the following has been noticed and noted in the public record of the AI Inquiry is huge in part because it officially points the finger at the GOI for having been responsible in part for orchestrating these heinous acts. Secondly it points fingers at both Parmar and Brar for having masterminded and carrying out the bombings. Finally, and I guess for some the biggest shocker of all, calls out Lakhwinder Singh and the Federation for having been instruments of the Government.

Although it’s still too soon to know what the fall out from all this will be, I’m sure its going to turn a lot of heads and raise a whole load of new questions, from all sides. Particularly who is this DSP, why did he come out now, is his confession not an admission of guilt to having committed several crimes and if so does he not stand to be prosecuted for those crimes, who is the DSP’s daddy and what does he do, and a whole load else.

But more then anything else it introduces for the first time in a long while, an interesting new twist in what has already become one complex web of truths, mis-truths and lies.

—

For those interested in whats being said about the latest in the papers check out:

• http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.2…
• http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNew…
• http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/National/2007/07/…
• http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.h..
• More…

Or you could read below from the actual source - Tehelka.com

OPERATION SILENCE

The police encounter of Kanishka bombing’s alleged mastermind, Talwinder Parmar, may have been staged to save the real players. Vikram Jit Singh reports

Fifteen years after Babbar Khalsa International leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, one of the two alleged masterminds of the mid-air bombing of Air India’s Kanishka airplane, was shown as having being killed in an encounter in Punjab, retired Punjab Police DSP Harmail Singh Chandi, who nabbed Parmar from Jammu in September 1992 and interrogated him for five days before he was killed along with five others, has come forward with the claim that Parmar was killed in police custody on the orders of senior police officers, who also asked his confession record to be destroyed. In his confession, Parmar had named Lakhbir Singh Brar “Rode”, nephew of the late Bhindranwale and head of the banned International Sikh Youth Federation, as the mastermind of the bombing. Rode, who is now said to be holed up in Lahore, has never figured in the investigations of either the CBI or the Canadian authorities.

Chandi has brought forward the entire record of Parmar’s confession, including audio tapes and statements, before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the John Major Commission of Inquiry that is reinvestigating the June 23, 1985 blast that claimed 331 lives off the Irish coast. Chandi had been ordered by senior officers to destroy the records but he retained them secretly. The record was brought before the Major Commission due to seven-year-long investigations by the Punjab Human Rights Organisation (PHRO), a Chandigarh-based ngo that conducted interviews of Parmar’s associates in India and Canada and pieced together a comprehensive report. The PHRO’s Principal Investigator Sarbjit Singh and lawyer Rajvinder Singh Bains flew to Canada along with Harmail in June and produced their findings before the Commission’s counsels.

A Canadian citizen, Parmar was shown as having been killed in an exchange of fire between police and six militants in the wee hours of October 15, 1992, near village Kang Arian in Phillar sub-division. However, evidence brought forward by Harmail (who was then DSP, Phillaur) shows that Parmar was interrogated between October 9 and 14 by senior police officers, where he revealed that the blasts were instigated by Lakhbir Singh Brar Rode.

Parmar’s confession reads: “Around May 1985, a functionary of the International Sikh Youth Federation came to me and introduced himself as Lakhbir Singh and asked me for help in conducting some violent activities to express the resentment of the Sikhs. I told him to come after a few days so that I could arrange for dynamite and battery etc. He told me that he would first like to see a trial of the blast…After about four days, Lakhbir Singh and another youth, Inderjit Singh Reyat, both came to me. We went into the jungle (of British Columbia). There we joined a dynamite stick with a battery and triggered off a blast. Lakhbir and Inderjit, even at that time, had in their minds a plan to blast an aeroplane. I was not too keen on this plan but agreed to arrange for the dynamite sticks. Inderjit wanted to use for this purpose a transistor fitted with a battery…That very day, they took dynamite sticks from me and left.

“Then Lakhbir Singh, Inderjit Singh and their accomplice, Manjit Singh, made a plan to plant bombs in an Air India (AI) plane leaving from Toronto via London for Delhi and another flight that was to leave Tokyo for Bangkok. Lakhbir Singh got the seat booking done from Vancouver to Tokyo and then onwards to Bangkok, while Manjit Singh got it done from Vancouver to Toronto and then from Toronto to Delhi. Inderjit prepared the bags for the flights, which were loaded with dynamite bombs fitted with a battery and transistor. They decided that the suitcases will be booked but they themselves will not travel by the same flights although they will take the boarding passes. After preparing these bombs, the plan was ready for execution by June 21 or 22, 1985. However, the bomb to be kept in the flight from Tokyo to Delhi via Bangkok exploded at the Narita airport on the conveyor belt. The second suitcase that was loaded on the Toronto-Delhi ai flight exploded in the air.”

Sarabjit said the PHRO’s probe has shown that Parmar was killed to hide the name of Lakhbir, who was an Indian agent. “After the Khalistan movement gained in sympathy in the West, especially in Canada, after the 1984 Blue Star operation and the killing of Sikhs in Delhi, a plot was hatched to discredit the Sikh movement. Parmar was roped in by Lakhbir at the behest of his masters. The Punjab Police got orders to finish off Parmar as he knew too much about the main perpetrators. On the day of the Kanishka blast, an explosion took place at Japan’s Narita airport, where two Japanese baggage handlers were killed. The plot was to trigger blasts when the two aircraft had de-embarked their passengers but the 1 hour 40 minute delay in Kanishka’s takeoff led to the bomb exploding mid-air,” Sarbjit said.

What gives credence to Sarabjit’s charge is the Source Report (in Tehelka’s posession) prepared by the Jalandhar Police soon after Parmar was killed. Based on information provided by Parmar — though not attributing it to his interrogation — the report makes no reference to Lakhbir. Interestingly, Lakhbir, accused in many acts of terrorist violence, is wanted by the Indian Government in only a minor case registered in Moga, Punjab. The Red Corner Interpol notice, A-23/1-1997, put out by the CBI against Lakhbir states: “OFFENCES: House breaking, theft, damage by fire.”

The PHRO told Canadian authorties that conclusive evidence existed of Parmar being killed in police custody and not in the “encounter” shown in FIR No 105 registered at Phillaur police station on October 15, 1992. The PHRO report, AI Flight 182 Case, states “On October 14, 1992, a high-level decision was conveyed to the police that Parmar had to be killed…The contradiction in the FIR and post-mortem report (PMR) is too obvious. As per the FIR, Parmar was killed by AK-47 fire by SSP Satish K Sharma from a rooftop. The PMR shows the line of fire of the three bullets is different. It cannot be if one person is firing from a fixed position. The PMR is very sketchy and no chemical analysis was done. Moreover, the time of death is between 12am and 2am according to the PMR, whereas the FIR records the time of death at 5.30am.”

Then Jalandhar SSP and now IGP, Satish K Sharma, denied the charge. “It was a clean encounter. The RCMP is bringing this up because they botched their investigations and failed to get convictions,” he said.

Firstly let me apologize to those of you who I left hanging for the last little without any updates. Fortnuatlly I was busy for the better part of the month and then lazy for the other half. None the less when I saw this story I thought that maybe its time to take a break from taking a break and get back into the mix of things.

Most of you have probably heard about the ban on Singh and Kaur that has been going on by the Canadian Immigration offices in Delhi. All though the practice has been going on for 10 years now, most of us had been oblivious to it until it made headlines recently. Anyway’s the government has since issued an apology and something along the lines of stating a change in policy.

Without getting to much into that though, I was kind of surprised to be reading the following from the CBC today:

Sikh name-change letter challenged on Facebook

Last Updated: Monday, July 30, 2007 | 7:20 AM ET

CBC News

Sikh groups angry about a controversial government letter requesting name changes for Sikh immigrants have taken their fight to the popular social networking website Facebook.

At least five online groups dedicated to discussing the government letter, which asked people with the common Sikh surnames Singh and Kaur to change their last names before coming to Canada, have been created.

Kupreet Singh, an administrator for one of the groups protesting the letter, said his forum has already attracted more than 400 members.

He said the online members are proof that Canadians are dissatisfied with Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley’s response last week. A spokesman from her department told CBC News a letter from the Canadian High Commission stating “the names Kaur and Singh do not qualify for the purpose of immigration to Canada” was not government policy and was “poorly worded.”

Finley added that the letter did not demand that people named Singh or Kaur change their names, but was actually a request for them to add a surname in order to help the department be more efficient.

Singh said the members of his Facebook group are demanding more clarification on the issue.

“We would like [Minister Finley] to instruct her New Delhi office that not only should they not require people to change their names,” he said, “but not even request [a name change].”

Immigrants fear delays in applications

Immigrants are in a vulnerable position, Singh said. They fear that if they do not comply with a government request, their immigration applications may be delayed or even ignored.

Asking people to change their names simply to ease up some bureaucratic filing is unreasonable, he said.

The name-change controversy erupted after Tarvinder Kaur, waiting for her husband Jaspal Singh to arrive in Canada, learned his application to become a permanent resident had been delayed for more than a month because of his last name.

When CBC News first asked about the letter, immigration officials said the policy to ask for a third name was put in place 10 years ago.

More then anything, I was surprised by the fact that the CBC actually noticed the Facebook group and used it as the base of the Sikh voice. Not that this is a bad thing, just an interesting trend that I’ve seen emerging amongst the media, where they’ve now started to scour Facebook and other social networking sites to gauge the reaction of the public. The Toronto Star has written a few stories based souly from accounts taken from Facebook including the more recent Turban ban @ Marlowe story. Whether this trend will continue or not is still to be seen, however it does offer an interesting alternative to all those petitions that are often prepared that rarely get anyone’s attention.