Forty-one years after Air India Flight 182 was blown out of the sky, killing all 329 people aboard, Canada appears ready to scale back the investigation into one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in its history. For the families who have carried the loss for four decades, the message that there are ‘no fresh leads’ is not closure. It is another wound.

Some wounds refuse to close. The bombing of Air India Flight 182, the Kanishka, is one, and this month it was torn open again. At a meeting near Toronto on 12 September, the RCMP told roughly 40 relatives that it has no fresh leads and plans to reduce its Air India team to administrative staff only.

I was 17 when that bomb took my entire family. I know exactly what "no leads" costs.

On 23 June 1985, a suitcase bomb exploded at Tokyo’s Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers. Fifty-four minutes later, a second bomb destroyed Flight 182 over the Atlantic, off the Irish coast. All 329 people aboard died, including 82 children under 13. Until 9/11, it was history’s deadliest aviation bombing. It remains the worst mass murder in Canadian history.

Relatives flew to Cork to claim the dead. I spent 25 days in a makeshift morgue there, searching through remains for my own family. Every anniversary since has reopened that room.

For a decade, nothing moved. In 1995, a $1 million reward was announced, but fear inside the community was so deep that almost nobody came forward. Charges arrived only in 2000, fifteen years after the........

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