By Allan Dowd

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 1 (Reuters) - A secret recording of Sikh militants just days before the 1985 Air India bombing may have warned of a pending terror attack, a Canadian inquiry was told on Tuesday, but police could not agree about the usefulness of the evidence.

Local police investigating an unrelated case said they secretly recorded Sikh extremists in Vancouver on June 12, 1985, who promised there would be an unspecified event in "two weeks". Flight 182 exploded on June 23, 1985, off the coast of Ireland, killing 329 people.

The officer who recorded the comment was unaware that there had been threats to Air India, but passed the information along to Canada's national police and spy agencies before the attack, which remains history's deadliest bombing of an airliner.

"Once I heard of the explosion. That's the thought I had; that's what they meant," Don McLean of the Vancouver Police Department told an inquiry in Ottawa into Canada's handling of the Flight 182 investigation.

But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said its translators who reviewed the secretly recorded tape after the attack could not hear the comment made in the Punjabi language or determine who might have made it, according to documents presented to the hearing in Ottawa.

Flight 182 was blown up by a suitcase bomb while on a flight from Canada to India via London, killing everyone on the Boeing 747.

The bombing was believed to have been organized by Sikh militants living in Canada who were waging a violent campaign for an independent Sikh homeland in India and wanted revenge for India's 1984 storming of the Golden Temple.

Critics of Canada's handling of the case say authorities missed opportunities to prevent the bombing, and then bungled the investigation so that those responsible were never charged or convicted.

Although details of the alleged bombing plot were published in the media within weeks of the 1985 attack, police did not file murder charges until late 2000, saying they had lacked enough evidence to prosecute the case.

Two men charged with murder, Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik, were found not guilty after a lengthy trial. A third suspect, Inderjit Singh Reyat, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge.

According to McLean, police recorded a member of the Sikh militant group Babbar Khalsa complaining to a member of the International Sikh Youth Federation: "No ambassadors have been killed. What are you going to do? Nothing?"

"You will see something be done in two weeks," the member of the federation said.

None of the people involved in the conversation was charged in connection with the Air India bombing, and the recording was made as part of an unrelated police investigation.

Both Babbar Khalsa and the federation were declared terror organizations by Canada in 2003.

The founder of Babbar Khalsa, Talwinder Singh Parmar, is believed by police to have been the mastermind of the Air India bombing. He was killed by Indian police in 1992.

McLean said he thought the discussion was about an attack on Indian government offices in Vancouver, which has a large Sikh population.

Another Vancouver police officer told the inquiry on Monday that he received a tip in October 1984 that an attack was being planned against Air India and passed that information along to the RCMP and Canada's spy agency.

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