Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Everywhere, nerves were on edge. At London's Heathrow, the world's busiest international airport, armored vehicles and troops carrying automatic weapons stood guard during the stopover of an Air India flight. In Toronto four bomb threats, all crank calls as it turned out, compelled authorities to delay the loading of three flights and to pull a fourth off the runway. In Rome an Austrian Airlines DC-9 en route to Vienna was recalled following an anonymous bomb threat. At Boston's Logan International Airport yet another call about a bomb forced hundreds to vacate a terminal while police...
That unsettling possibility gained further credibility as details emerged about an explosion at the Tokyo international airport less than an hour before the Air India crash. As baggage from Canadian Pacific Flight 003 was being unloaded, a bomb suddenly ripped both the door and roof off the freight container, sending clothes and suitcases flying. The explosion killed two airport workers and injured four others. Had the flight not arrived from Vancouver a quarter-hour early, the bomb might have gone off while the 747, which carried 374 passengers and 16 crew members, was over the ocean...
...debris at sea also supported suspicions that the Air India crash had been triggered by a bomb. The presence of uninflated life rafts and the emergence of some bodies still wearing airline slippers, suggested that the passengers, most of them of Indian descent and many of them children, had been taken by surprise. "Explosion is considered a possibility," said Ashok Gehlot, India's Minister of State for Civil Aviation, "in view of the fact that the wreckage is spread over a wide area. Sabotage is a distinct possibility...
Short of a bomb, indeed, experts were hard put to explain the disaster. Even if the pilot had lost all four engines simultaneously, aviation sources pointed out, he could have sent a distress signal and possibly continued to glide for 30 minutes. And even if his power source had been cut, he could have used a backup system. In addition, officials observed, sudden disappearances from radar and crashes at sea are very rare. Never before has a commercial jet crossing the Atlantic plunged into the ocean...
...would have wished to plant a bomb on the flight? No group rushed to claim responsibility. "We have had threats of hijacking made to our headquarters in India and elsewhere," said Francis D'gama, regional manager for Air India in Britain. "These have been made for some time." Whoever was responsible may have been seeking maximum publicity: the plane was two hours behind schedule when it crashed, and a time-release bomb might have been designed to go off during the stop at London, where there is a large international press corps. The motives for the explosion in Japan were...