AIR INDIA - A Plethora Of Warnings

A few days later, Dhar says, he also tipped off one of his official RCMP contacts. He can no longer recall the officer's name. "He told me `Don't worry, I'll take care of it,'" Dhar recalled. "Still, I never got the sense that the RCMP appreciated the urgency or importance of what they were dealing with." Reached by phone at his Ottawa home yesterday, French said he doesn't remember receiving any information from Dhar about threats to Air India flights. Even if he had, French says he's not sure he would have passed it along to his RCMP contact, Sgt. Dick Muir. "It was a civil aviation matter, not a diplomatic matter," he said. "If it wasn't a threat to an embassy, I'd be hesitant to make a scene about it." At the time of the bombing, French says he was already under a cloud in his job because of allegations he failed to relay information that might have helped thwart a March 1985 attack on the Turkish embassy in which a security guard was killed and the ambassador was severely injured. French says he was subsequently assigned to administrative duties, but appealed the department's decision and was posted to Sri Lanka for two years before retiring. http://www.thestar.com/News/article/213189 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on May 16, 2007]

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