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I was misunderstood, says Kanishka witness

Source:PTI
November 07, 2003 12:14 IST

The key witness in Air-India bombing case has said the Crown prosecutor has misunderstood many of the things she told him in pre-trial interviews.

Complete coverage of the Kanishka case

The prosecutor, Joe Bellows, got information wrong, including the impression that she wrote about two confessions made by prime accused Ripudaman Singh Malik regarding his involvement in the Air-India bombing case, she told the court on Thursday.

The court was earlier told the woman wrote in her diary about her various conversations with Vancouver-based businessman Malik, with whom she had a relationship. She has also testified that Malik confessed to her twice.

But yesterday, she said, "I have never written about Air-India in the diary."

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"Mr Bellows, most of the time you didn't get it right," said the woman, who can't be named under court order. "He mispronounced Sikh names and mixed up Sikh institutions," she said.

"I tell you five years worth of things and when you take those things, you blend them together. I tell you things here and there, and most of the time you do not understand," she was quoted as saying in the court by the Globe and Mail.

The woman is the star prosecution witness in bombing of the Air-India flight 182 which went down off Irish coast on June 23, 1985 killing all 329 people on board.

The woman, who is in a Canadian witness protection programme for her own safety, said she resents that she has not seen her older son for five years but Bellows can see her whenever he likes.

She also resents that she has to tell him things that she does not want to talk about, she said.

She said she does not like prosecutor Bellows, who has questioned her extensively since 1999 and prepared her for testimony in court.

Malik and another Ajaib Singh Bagri, have been charged with murdering the 329 people killed in the Air-India crash and two people killed in a bomb explosion in Japan 54 minutes earlier.

Source: PTI
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