Word: blasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about 9 a.m. last Tuesday, scores of federal police officers and troops surrounded Hernandez's heavily guarded house in Ciudad Madero, northeast of Mexico City. Whether authorities first attempted to arrest Hernandez without force is unclear; what is beyond dispute is that the lawmen used a bazooka to blast open the front door. When the battle was over, a federal agent lay dead and Hernandez and about a dozen other union officials and bodyguards were under arrest...
...jittery air travelers, the news was decidedly mixed. No, the jumbo jet had not suddenly disintegrated in midair from metal fatigue. But, yes, there are people out there who are capable of planting bombs aboard passenger planes to blast them -- and hundreds of innocents -- out of the sky. When Britain's Department of Transport announced last week that investigators had found "conclusive evidence of a detonating high explosive" that shattered Pan Am Flight 103 at 31,000 ft. above Scotland, killing some 270 people, two questions took on a grim priority...
...when a set air pressure has developed near the bomb. Since the cargo holds in a 747 are pressurized after takeoff along with the cabin, the barometer could detect this change and start the timer. If such a technique was used on Flight 103, it failed to postpone the blast until the aircraft was over water only because high-altitude winds caused the crew to take a northerly course over Scotland before heading west...
...Jibril terrorists have a history of aerial bombings. They claimed responsibility for the 1970 explosion that downed a Swissair flight shortly after takeoff from Zurich on its way to Tel Aviv, killing 47 people, and for a 1972 blast aboard an El Al airliner that landed without casualties. West German police are searching for any connection between this group and the Pan Am tragedy. "The group is pro-Syrian, anti-Arafat and anti-P.L.O.," contends a U.S. State Department fact sheet. "It has strong ties to Syria, although Libya has also long supported...
Another technological approach would not prevent bombings, but it could help identify those who commit them. Explosives can be chemically "tagged" so that telltale traces can be used to determine their origin after a blast. If producer nations could agree on a tagging system for military explosives, it would increase the chance that future terrorists might be tracked down and brought to justice...