Sidhu trial delay as defence
questions Mountie’s honesty
during Dziekanski taser inquiry
“I was very fond of him ... at that time,” Rideout said,
adding he felt Sidhu had “great potential.”
Glenda Luymes, Vancouver Province, June 2, 2010
Former RCMP undercover drug cop Rapinder “Rob” Sidhu,
prepares to leave Surrey Provincial Court on June 2, 2010.
Sidhu is accused of impersonating a police officer to get
the home address of gangsters, the Bacon brothers.
Photo: Mark van Manen, PNG.
A recording of a phone call that led to a serious RCMP security breach was played in provincial court in Surrey Wednesday during the trial of a former police officer.
Rapinder “Rob” Sidhu is charged with impersonating a police officer to access the RCMP database and find out where the Bacon brothers were living in July 2007.
In the recording of the phone call made to Surrey RCMP’s Operations Communications Centre, a man identified himself as “Roberts from IHIT” — the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team — and asked the dispatcher to “run” a name through the police database.
The man seemed casual, but said the call was “fairly important.”
The dispatcher put him on hold before asking for the name.
“Surname is Bacon,” said the man. “It should be a Jonathan, James or a Jarrod.”
The dispatcher gave the address, but seemed to become suspicious when the man asked for more details about the Bacon family. She asked the caller to identify himself again and provide an identification number. The caller then hung up.
The prosecution is trying to prove Sidhu, a former undercover drug cop who resigned in 2003 after an internal RCMP investigation, is the man who made the call.
The security breach caused the Bacon brothers, who had already been targeted by rival gangsters, to move from Surrey to Port Moody in the summer of 2007.
In court Wednesday, RCMP Supt. Wayne Rideout said he received a call from the officer investigating the security breach. The officer asked him to come to the Surrey detachment. Once he was there, he played a recording of the phone call.
Rideout said he did not know about the security breach until he heard the recording and “I was able to identify the person on the telephone.”
Rideout said he recognized Sidhu’s voice from their time working together at the Surrey RCMP detachment in the 1990s.
“I was very fond of him ... at that time,” he said, adding he felt Sidhu had “great potential.”
Rideout heard from Sidhu again in 2006, three years after his resignation, when they had two telephone conversations and a meeting in Abbotsford.
When asked why he believed it was Sidhu’s voice on the recording, Rideout said he recognized the “nasally tone” and a “certain pattern” of speaking.
The long-time police officer’s testimony was abruptly halted during cross examination when defense lawyer Matt Nathanson tried to question him about his involvement in the Robert Dziekanski taser incident at Vancouver airport. The defense hopes to question Rideout’s credibility based on statements he made at the Braidwood Inquiry.
“The tap dancing under oath at the Braidwood Inquiry by this officer ...reflects his credibility,” said Nathanson.
Judge John Lenaghan asked Rideout to step down and said he will hear arguments from both Crown and defense about the line of questioning at a later time.
Sidhu, who was wearing a pink shirt and purple tie beneath a dark suit, had his collar-length hair slicked back from his forehead and listened intently during the testimony.
He is facing other charges from a domestic incident in Abbotsford in March.
Read about Vancouver police liar Ian Upton,
another specialist in dishonest investigations
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