Trans-national Terrorism - A blotch in History: The Kanishka Verdict, twenty years later

The war against trans-national terrorism suffered a serious setback on Thursday, with a Canadian court acquitting the two accused of the mid-air explosion of an ill-fated Air India Boeing 747 airliner, ‘Kanishka’. Twenty years after the deadliest terrorist attack before 9/11, Canadian Judge Ian Bruce Josephson Wednesday declared the two accused Indo-Canadians - Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Babri - innocent. Josephson called the evidence presented by witnesses as inconsistent and accused Canadian security agencies of gross negligence in investigations into the bombing of Air-India Flight 182 over Ireland that killed 329 people.

While media reports pour in on the coverage, the frustration and trauma of the victims, it seems like the Kanishka probe was botched up in several ways, pointing to serious negligence (perhaps intentional?) in the investigations. According to this news article, the judge flayed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for destroying evidence, including wiretap evidence on all major suspects in and around 1996. CSIS also deliberately destroyed tapes and transcripts of its 1987 interviews with a woman who eventually emerged as the star witness.

Here is a related article on a former Indian Intelligence Bureau director's views on the verdict.

More.

All in all, I think this has been a very sad event...