Word: crashing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Americans were being held in Building No. 18 in the Sheik Abdullah barracks in the Baalbek region of Lebanon. "Very possibly," adds Wheaton, "North ordered the raid after irate Iranian officials threatened to retaliate for a shipment of the wrong Hawk missiles." In fact, three days before the Gander crash, North revealed both his determination to continue the Iranian arms shipments and his concern for the hostages' safety. "To stop now in midstream," he wrote, "would ignite Iranian fire. Hostages would be our minimum losses...
Another mystery surrounding the Gander crash are the lingering ailments that plague many of the fire fighters and other rescue workers, whose liver enzyme rate was found to be abnormally high. They had been warned to watch out for nerve-gas canisters. However, Wheaton says, "the real hazard was possibly radiation poisoning from nuclear backpacks, portable units with timing devices that Special Forces personnel sometimes carry to blow up bridges and block their pursuers...
While the wreckage in Lockerbie was meticulously sifted for bomb clues, no such effort was made in Gander. Yet there was good reason to take seriously the Islamic Jihad's boast that it had blown up the Arrow Air jet. Telephone calls claiming responsibility for the crash were immediately received by both the U.S. consulate in Oran, Algeria, and Reuters news agency in Beirut. The Beirut caller even knew that the plane had been delayed for five hours in Cologne, and explained that was why it blew up over Canada instead of over the U.S. He said...
...bomb, Wheaton contends, could have been planted on the plane in the Cairo airport, where a 30-minute blackout occurred during loading and where, he says, Egyptian baggage handlers were unsupervised by Americans. One month after the crash, the American embassy in Mauritius received a letter signed "Sons of Zion." It described how the Arrow Air jet was "sabotaged" by a "cold-blooded, premeditated act . . . a few hours before take-off with the complicity of several Egyptian and Libyan mechanics...
Repeated efforts by the Families for Truth About Gander to open FBI files about the crash have failed. Democratic Congressman Robin Tallon of South Carolina has tried to help. Two years ago, he persuaded 103 other members of the House of Representatives to petition President Bush to initiate an "investigation to explore all possible crash theories." Bush never responded. Tallon, who says that up until then he had frequently visited the White House, says he was never invited back. "The FBI and CIA have also sealed me off," Tallon complains. "They don't even answer my phone calls...