Word: pans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Inevitably, that left the horrific prospect that Flight 103 had been deliberately blown out of the skies. David Kyd, public relations director of the Geneva-based International Air Transport Association, noted the similarities between the Pan Am crash and that of an Air India 747 that disappeared into the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland in June 1985, killing all 329 people aboard. The subsequent investigation, aided by the underwater recovery of the plane's flight recorder, or "black box," determined that a bomb in the forward cargo hold had blown off the front section of the aircraft. Sikh extremists...
Adding credence to that possibility was the news that American embassies in Europe and the Middle East had received advisories from Washington more than a week earlier that a bomb threat had explicitly been made against Pan Am ( flights from Frankfurt to the U.S. The threat had come from an anonymous telephone caller to the American embassy in Helsinki. The tipster said a man in Frankfurt, identified only as Abdullah, planned to give a bomb to an accomplice named Yassan Garadad, who in turn would persuade an unwitting woman passenger to take the deadly package on board with...
Though the Finnish government subsequently said it knew the identity of the telephone tipster and did not take the warning seriously, the FAA was sufficiently concerned to advise all major U.S. carriers, including Pan Am, of the threat, though the news was not passed on to the general public. After the crash, some bereaved relatives of the victims expressed anger that neither the Government nor the airline had seen fit to caution the public. In response, Government agencies pointed out that they frequently receive warnings of terrorist activity, most of which are meaningless; in fact, more than 100 advisories...
Still another possibility was that Islamic extremists linked to Iran were involved. In London an anonymous caller to the Associated Press claimed that the Pan Am plane had been attacked in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus last July by the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, which mistook the passenger plane for an F-14 fighter. All 290 aboard perished...
...Pan Am Flight 103 was sabotaged, how was the crime carried out? Among the possibilities...