Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper promised to respond positively to the damning report into the 1985 Kanishka bombing, specifically on the call for compensation, as the families torn apart by the tragedy said the word 'closure' still haunts them.The final report into the Air India tragedy that killed 329 people recommended ex-gratia payment to families of victims, mostly of Indian-origin, and blamed government for its failure to prevent the country's worst terrorist attack.

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Soon after the report's release, Harper met the families and termed the document a "damning indictment of many things that occurred before and after the tragedy"."Our government launched this inquiry to bring closure to those who still grieve and to ensure that measures are taken to prevent such a tragedy in the future."We thank commissioner major for his work and once again extend our deepest sympathies to the families and friends for the loved ones they lost," he said.The four-year inquiry calls for a powerful national security czar with direct access to the PM to sort out disputes between the police and Canada's spy agency - an ongoing turf war that it said continues to this day. "For too long the greatest loss of Canadian lives at the hands of terrorists has somehow been relegated outside the Canadian consciousness," justice John Major, who led the committee, said as he announced his findings. The report recommended appropriate compensation for the families."The families in some ways have often been treated as adversaries, as if they had somehow brought this calamity uponthemselves," he said.The report elicited a positive response from families, who said they were relieved that most of their concerns were addressed but maintained that "closure" was a far-fetched term."I think closure is a word that continues to haunt us," Lata Pada, who lost her teen-aged daughters and husband in the bombings, said."We can never have closure from a tragedy of this enormous devastation. What we can have is the satisfaction that we've come to a point where an inquiry has actually happened and an extensive report with recommendations has actually become a reality," she was quoted as saying by the CBC news.Speaking to reporters in Ottawa, family members said the inquiry into federal mismanagement of the probe answers many of their concerns and confirms it was not an accident. "I think the report addresses most of the concerns that the families raised... It confirms what families suspected when asking for the inquiry: that it was not a sheer accident, that it was a compounding of mistake after mistake after mistake," said Bal Gupta, who lost his wife in the bombings.The report and the government's acknowledgement of the tragedy has been a long time coming, added Gupta. 

"We were not allowed to meet any government minister for almost 10 years... "The first time we met with the government was in 1995. We were treated like troublemakers," he was quoted as saying by CBC.To prevent the intelligence sharing error that marked the incident, the report recommends that the National Security Advisor, a job that currently exists in a much more diminished role, would be the ultimate security authority. 

The NSA would help shepherd terrorism prosecutions through courts, as would a new director of terrorism prosecutions."The time to right that historical wrong is now... This was the largest mass-murder in Canadian history," justice major observed.Ontario's former lieutenant-governor James Bartleman, had stunned the Air India inquiry when he disclosed that Ottawa knew about a terrorist threat to the airline days before the 1985 bombing.Bartleman stood vindicated as justice major dismissed government attacks challenging him as "ineffectual", while thecommission's lead counsel called his testimony "courageous."Bartleman delivered the most stunning testimony at the Air India inquiry three years ago.In 1985, Bartleman, was director of security and intelligence for the department of external affairs, a position that involved reviewing raw intelligence reports from the Communications Security Establishment.Justice major suggested that agents with the CanadianSecurity Intelligence Agency should get with the times and lose their longstanding aversion to the courts.

The Kanishka flight 182 from Montreal to Delhi was blown off mid air near the Irish coast by Khalistani elements seeking revenge for the June 1984 Indian Army operation at the Golden Temple in Punjab.Another bomb, meant for another Air India flight, also went off at Tokyo airport the same day, killing two baggage handlers.Years of criminal investigation have yielded just one conviction, for manslaughter, against a British Columbia mechanic Inderjit Singh Reyat who assembled bomb  components. Two other men - Rupinder Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri- were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Another suspect Talwinder Singh Parmar died in police custody in 1992.