Vancouver It has been almost a year since the fateful events of October 14 at Vancouver International Airport, and the impending anniversary is one that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would rather forget. Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski had just landed after his first-ever flight. He was visibly distraught as he wandered the airport's security zone for hours, even as his frantic mother looked for him in the arrivals area. They never found each other. The next time Zofia Cisowski would see her son, he would be dead. Nearly a dozen inquiries and investigations were launched by various government bodies after his death. In Vancouver last week, one of the most public of those investigations appeared to have been stymied again by police reticence to discuss the incident. The RCMP were called to the airport when Dziekanski, 40, started getting agitated at his inability to find anyone who could understand him. He began picking up and hurling furniture. Less than a minute after the police arrived, one of the four officers at the scene made the fateful, and fatal, decision to shoot Dziekanski with a taser. That split-second decision has haunted police ever since, triggering an unprecedented public outcry. Video shot by a bystander showed quite clearly that Dziekanski was unarmed; particularly troubling, the video evidence directly contradicted the initial police description of the incident. Before the video was released, the RCMP said Dziekanski was behaving violently. Yet the only physical contact was when the officers piled on him after he had been tasered - at one point, an officer could be seen pressing his knee down on the man's neck. The British Columbia government initially refused to call an inquiry into the death but bowed under immense public pressure and appointed former judge Thomas Braidwood to head one. A second phase of the inquiry was scheduled to begin just after the first anniversary of Dziekanski's death, but Mr Braidwood has revealed that the RCMP will not participate. It caps a year of foot-dragging by the RCMP. With the matter under criminal investigation, little has been revealed about the fate of the four officers involved. Adding insult to the agony of Ms Cisowski, Canadian police have spent time in Poland investigating her son and his actions before his arrival to Canada. That prompted questions about the appropriateness of the RCMP in effect investigating themselves. Earlier this year, an opposition member of the federal Parliament lashed out at the RCMP. 'I would like us to get to the heart of the matter,' Serge Menard of the Bloc Quebecois said after the RCMP were called to testify - and instead of telling politicians what happened at the airport, presented a report on police procedures and processes. It now turns out that the RCMP were never planning to testify at the provincial inquiry. Commission counsel Art Vertlieb said that while the RCMP could be subpoenaed to testify, he was hopeful that measure would not be necessary. The RCMP said it could not participate until it knew whether charges would be laid against their officers. And since that decision will not be made until the second week of next month, the second phase of the taser inquiry has been delayed until November 12. All along, the RCMP has continued to resist demands for answers - fuelling public frustration. There is a growing sense that nothing less than a charge of murder will satisfy critics. Tomorrow: New York
