Friday, September 29 2006 15:11 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Toronto: Irish authorities did a 'fantastic'job to recover bodies of those on board the fateful Air India Flight 182 Kanishka downed by a terrorist bomb off Ireland's coast, a Canadian diplomat has submitted before a judicial commission investigating the bombing.

"Irish authorities did a fantastic job of recovering as many bodies as possible, setting up a makeshift morgue, and arranging for social workers, doctors, nurses and police to guide families through the painful task of identifying the remains," Canadian Foreign Affairs official Scott Hetherington, who was dispatched to Ireland to help family members of the victims, told the Justice John Major Commission in Ottawa yesterday.

The Canadian Government was as stunned as everyone else by the disaster in which none of the 329 passengers and crew survived, and frustrated it could not do more to help grieving relatives of the victims in the days following the June 23, 1985 attack, the diplomat submitted.



"It took several days for diplomats from Ottawa and elsewhere to reach Ireland to supplement the small Canadian mission in Dublin. Communication and co-ordination were constant problems in those days before laptop computers, e-mail and cell phones," Heatherington said.

But he said the department learned lessons from the experience and put them to use after the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the United States. Heatherington, who by then was head of foreign intelligence, recalled that an emergency meeting was under way and plans were being laid within an hour of the first plane striking the World Trade Centre.