A long-awaited inquiry into the 1985 Air India Kanishka bombing, which killed 329 people mostly of Indian origin, today blamed the Canadian government for its failure to prevent the tragedy and recommended the appointment of a powerful security czar to resolve disputes between conflicting interests among security agencies.

"The government needs to take responsibility to avoid further failure and to prevent a return to a culture of complacency," Justice John Major, the head of the Kanishka bombing inquiry commission recommended today, nearly 25 years after Canada's worst terrorist attack.

Canada's national security adviser should be given sweeping new powers to resolve disputes between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Canadian Security and Intelligence Services (CSIS), Justice Major told a live press conference in Ottawa.

In the much awaited final report from the commission that investigated the bombing of Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985, he observed that national security continues to be badly organised between the RCMP and Canada's spy agency.

He also recommended radical transformation in prosecution.

The national security adviser, who currently provides advice to the prime minister on security and intelligence issues, should also be the final arbiter where the two agencies disagree, Major said.

Caution for govt

Major, in his 3,200 pages report, said it is the federal government's responsibility to see it doesn't happen again.

"This is a Canadian atrocity," said Major, who spent four years going through tens of thousands of documents and hearing more than 200 witnesses before completing the report into the bombing.

"This was the largest mass-murder in Canadian history," said Major.

Major underlined that the "finest tribute" that could be paid the victims of the bombing is to create a rigorous aviation security system.

"This will require co-operation and resources but, most importantly, leadership from the highest level of government. Canada owes this legacy to the victims and their families," he said.

The report was not expected to provide much answers to the queries of families and relatives as to who was responsible for the attack.

Years of criminal investigation have yielded just one conviction, for manslaughter, against a British Columbia mechanic Inderjit Singh Reyat who assembled bomb components.

Two other  men - Rupinder Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri - were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Another suspect Talwinder Singh Parmar died in police custody in 1992.

Major had earlier promised that the stories of the victims' families would be placed on record in the inquiry report.

"Entire families were lost. Others were emotionally destroyed by the death of their loved ones, fracturing their home lives," Major wrote.

In addition to a beefed-up national security advisor, Major's report offers 28 other recommendations, including that terrorism prosecutions at the federal level should be run by a Director of Terrorism Prosecutions to work closely with the state agencies in the investigative and prosecutorial stages.

It also recommended that the unit should be set up inside the attorney-general's office, and not within the independent public prosecutor's office, so that terror prosecutions are conducted in an integrated manner and not plagued by gaps.

It asked the CSIS to retain records and not destroy secret intelligence for a period of 25 years.

It called for new procedures to protect the anonymity of informers and greater secrecy protections for documents given to the national security advisor.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will meet relatives of the victims of the attack later today.