Wednesday, September 27 2006 15:31 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Toronto: A retired Supreme Court judge heard the emotional testimony on the second day of a public inquiry into the 1985 bombing of an Air India Boeing 747 exploded off the Irish coast killing all 329 people on board.

It took 20 years and a narrow escape from yet another potential tragedy - for Jayashree Thampi to come to terms with the Air India bombing.

Thampi, who lost her husband Lakshmanan and seven-year-old daughter Preethi in the 1985 terrorist attack, recounted how the enormity of it all overwhelmed her at the time.

"I closed my mind to the crash, I concentrated on my work at the Bank of Montreal," she told the public inquiry yesterday.

"I pretended it did not happen to me. In all those years I never cried for my daughter," he said.

The tears didn't come until last August -- after Thampi had watched in horror at Toronto's Pearson Airport as an Air France plane carrying her son Vivek skidded off a runway and burst into flames. This time the ending was a happy one, as Vivek emerged safely into his mother's embrace.

"Nobody understood why I was crying, because my son was safe," Thampi told a hushed hearing room in a trembling voice.

"They didn't know I wasn't crying for the son who made it, but for the daughter who didn't. For the first time in 20 years I mourned the death of my daughter and cried for her," he said.

Thampi is one of dozens of family members who have told -- or will tell -- their story to the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court judge John Major, in Ottawa yesterday belatedly mandated by the Conservative government to probe the June 1985 downing of Air India Flight 182 that took 329 lives.

Two Japanese baggage handlers died the same day when another bomb exploded on the ground at Narita Airport near Tokyo.

Both blasts were blamed on Sikh extremists campaigning for Khalistan homeland.

Justice Major has set aside the first three weeks of his hearings to let the families of the victims tell their stories in their own words. But they've done more than dwell on their personal grief. Virtually all so far have added heart-felt appeals to Major to get to the bottom of why Canadian security and police forces failed to prevent the bombing, then botchced the criminal investigation that followed.

"Air India was a preventable tragedy," said Thampi.

"Why did the system fail?" he said.

It's already known the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had the men suspected of planning the bombing under surveillance for months before the attack. And it's known that CSIS unthinkingly erased wiretap tapes both before and after the event, thus hampering the work of the RCMP in its effort to gather enough evidence for a criminal prosecution.

Two prime suspects, Ripudaman Singh Malik and AjaibSingh Bagri, did not face trial until two decades after the bombing -- only to be acquitted in a verdict last year that shocked the victims' families.

Major has no power to re-try those cases, but thefamilies cling to the hope that he can shed new light on the issue all the same.

"For 20 years we asked for a public inquiry," noted Padmini Turlapati, a Toronto pediatrician who lost two sons on Flight 182. Successive governments brushed off the demand for the kind of wide- ranging probe Major is now conducting, insisting that a more tightly focused case before the criminal courts would offer a better hope for justice.