Testimony about a possible cover-up of crucial evidence in the Air-India case and about unexplained tampering with sealed information in a police file was heard shortly before a controversial plea-bargain deal was struck with Inderjit Singh Reyat.
The evidence, presented at the pretrial hearing last month, dealt with the purchase of a $129 Sanyo tuner that police believed contained the bomb that exploded on June 23, 1985, at Japan's Narita Airport, killing two baggage handlers.
One hour later, a bomb explosion aboard an Air-India flight killed 329 people. Police allege the two bombs were placed on the aircraft in Vancouver by Sikh militants seeking revenge against the government of India.
Karen Smith, the salesclerk who sold the tuner used in the Narita bomb, told police that Mr. Reyat was not the man who bought it, Edward Ross Drozda testified in B.C. Supreme Court on Jan. 29.
Mr. Drozda, a retired RCMP officer who worked on the Air-India case from 1985 to 1992, also said that the clerk's statement to police may not have been disclosed to Mr. Reyat's defence lawyers when he was tried and convicted in 1991 of helping to make the bomb that killed the baggage handlers.
The court prohibited the media from reporting Mr. Drozda's testimony until yesterday. Mr. Justice Ian Bruce Josephson of the B.C. Supreme Court lifted the publication ban in response to an application from The Globe and Mail.
Mr. Reyat was convicted in 1991 in part because of police evidence indicating he bought the tuner at a Woolworth store on June 5, 1985. The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the lower court's decision, accepting that "the evidence established that [Mr. Reyat]purchased . . . one of only five tuners which could have housed the bomb."
Police linked the tuner to Mr. Reyat after tracing a fragment found at Narita Airport to a stock of tuners at a Woolworth store in Duncan, B.C., the town where Mr. Reyat lived. In August, 1985, police found an unsigned invoice at the store with "R-E-Y-A-T" written in the "deliver to" area.
Under intense police questioning in November, 1985, Mr. Reyat said he bought the tuner and told police where they could find a copy of the receipt. But Mr. Reyat has also contradicted himself, saying a man staying at his home bought the tuner and took it when he left. Mr. Reyat has said he didn't know the man's name.
On the final day of testimony before prosecutors negotiated a plea bargain with Mr. Reyat, Mr. Drozda testified that the salesclerk gave a statement to police on Aug. 19, 1985, about selling the tuner to two South Asian men.
About a month later, she informed police that she happened to see Mr. Reyat, and he was not the person who bought the tuner, Mr. Drozda said. Two days later, Ms. Smith described the purchaser while giving a statement to police while under hypnosis. Her description did not fit Mr. Reyat, the court was told.
However, at Mr. Reyat's trial, neither Mr. Reyat's defence lawyers nor the prosecutors asked Ms. Smith whether the purchaser was in the court room.
Although the pretrial hearing was stopped before Judge Josephson ruled on the significance of failing to disclose Ms. Smith's statements to police, the issue came up in court earlier on another matter.
Mr. Reyat's lawyers had previously argued that evidence collected by police in his home in November, 1985, subject to a search warrant, should be excluded because his constitutional rights had been violated, in part, by the failure to include Ms. Smith's statements in the application for the warrant.
Judge Josephson dismissed defence arguments about the importance of the failure to disclose the information, ruling on Dec. 13, 2002, that it "appears to have been through inadvertence."
During Mr. Drozda's testimony, the court also heard that an unidentified person had tampered with two boxes of sealed documents from the Narita trial.
The boxes, stored at Vancouver RCMP headquarters, contained copies of documents setting out information disclosed to Mr. Reyat's defence lawyers during the Narita trial.
Mr. Drozda testified that the boxes were sealed in 1992 after the trial. But on the day before he testified in the Air-India pretrial hearing, Mr. Drozda discovered the seal was broken. Some material had been removed and other material had been inserted, he said.