Updated on November 24 at 5 am:
Former Ontario Premier Bob Rae will conduct a focused inquiry to deal with unanswered questions about the 1985 Air-India bombing, Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan said on Wednesday.
Her announcement came hours after Rae recommended the government hold the inquiry.
Canada urged to re-examine Kanishka bombing
VANCOUVER (British Columbia): Victims of Air-India Flight 182 deserve a 'focused' independent inquiry into whether officials could have prevented the 1985 bombing, and then bungled the criminal investigation, according to a government report released on Wednesday.
The report stopped short of calling for a full judicial review of government actions, but said there were enough unanswered questions that a inquiry was needed to make sure the mistakes were not repeated.
"The Air India bombings were the worst encounter with terrorism that Canada has experienced. We cannot leave any issues unresolved," wrote report's author, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae.
Kanishka was destroyed on June 23, 1985, off the Irish coast, killing 329 people in history's deadliest bombing of a civilian airliner. A near-simultaneous attack on a second Air-India flight killed two Tokyo airport workers.
Investigators allege the bombings were the work of radical Sikh separatists living in Western Canada who wanted revenge on the Indian government for its bloody 1984 storming of the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar.
The government appointed Rae in April to review the case amid public uproar after a judge acquitted two Sikh activists charged with the bombings.
The criminal investigation was marked by controversy from its early stages, much of it involving the destruction of evidence by Canada's spy agency rather than sharing it with police looking for the bombers.
Rae said the inquiry should not repeat the criminal investigation, but make sure problems are not repeated, so that future attacks can be prevented.
