PTI
 
Toronto, Sep 19: Canada's spy agency was neither co-operative nor forthright during probe into the Kanishka bombing case, a former Crown prosecutor has said terming as "incompetent" its act of erasing wiretap tapes of key suspect in the case.

James Jardine submitted before the Air India inquiry commission on Tuesday that he was frustrated for months by the reluctance of Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to protect the tapes of Talwinder Singh Parmer, prime suspect in the June 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329 people, mostly of Indian origin.

CSIS decided the tapes, containing details of Parmar's telephone calls, had no evidential value and routinely erased them without police ever getting a chance to review, Jardine who is now a British Columbia Provincial Court judge told Commissioner John Major.

He wrote a brief note then stating his disbelief on the act of the agency. "In the brashness of the moment, I wrote inconceivable, incomprehensible, indefensible, incompetent."

Earlier, former Superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Lyman Henschel also told the commission that the central intelligence agency denied him access to the tapes.

Inquiry counsel Mark Freiman examined documents showing repeated requests by the RCMP and Jardine's prosecution team to get details of surveillance and wiretap tapes that could have provided evidence against Parmar, Inderjit Singh Reyat and other suspects in the case.