Easy Targets

Brace For Explosion

Mangled cockpit of Pan Am flight 103 after explosion

In the 1980’s, there was a conspicuous absence of strict security procedures at all major airports around the world. It was partly due to a lack of sophisticated technology and partly a fallout of the gross ignorance of intelligence officials at that time. In 1985, the flagship passenger plane of Air India named Emperor Kanishka, a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, was travelling from Montreal to New Delhi when it blasted in the Irish air space, killing all 329 people on board. At the same time, there was a bomb blast at Narita Airport in Tokyo when the bag that was carrying that bomb was being loaded on board another Air India flight to Bangkok. The terrorists had audacious plans of bringing down both planes at the same time. Criminal investigation was under way in Japan which revealed that the bombs were timer triggered and were housed in a radio tuner device. As the scope of investigation was widened to include India and Canada, it became clear that the dastardly attack was executed by an extremist Sikh group named Babbar Khalsa. In retaliation to Operation Bluestar in 1984 in which Sikh hardliners hiding in the premises of the Golden Temple in Amritsar were gunned down by the Indian Army, the very same unit attacked the Air India plane. They also demanded that an autonomous territory of Khalistan be created for them in Punjab region of India. Although the terrorists were brought to justice but the pain and scars of Canada’s worst aviation disaster in history are yet to be healed, they never will.

A very similar airplane bombing occurred in 1988 when the Pan Am flight travelling from London to New York exploded in mid air and fell in the quaint town of Lockerbie in south of Scotland, killing all 259 people on board. This time, the bomb was triggered by high altitude of the plane rather than a timer and it was encased in a smaller radio device. The electronic circuitry around the explosive was ingenious in its conception and it soon became clear that it could not have been the work of a novice. Eventually, investigation revealed that an intelligence officer of Libya was the mastermind behind the sinister plan and was thus responsible for bringing down the plane of America’s largest airline company at that time. Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya had been reeling under strict sanctions imposed by the US. The anti US persona of the dictator and the simmering tension between the two countries were responsible for the unforgivable loss of hundreds of innocent lives on board the plane.

When the security was tightened and it became next to impossible to carry even sharp objects, leave alone bombs in suitcases, a new era of human bombs- brain washed people willing to forsake their own lives for fulfilling the collective objective- surfaced on the scene. The hijack of Air India flight IC-814 in 1999, hijack and subsequent crash of airplanes into the World Trade Center in America in 2001 are just some of the horrendous events recorded in history. Passenger Airplane bombings began as far back as in early 1930s and have continued well into the twenty first century. There is no reason to assume that such events cannot repeat in near future. Although security has been beefed up in many major airports around the world but there still remain many other neglected ones which could be the next target of terrorists.    

Emperor Kanishka of Air India