Intelligence

Plot over Pacific foiled in 1995

TheStar.com - Plot over Pacific foiled in 1995

Liquid bombs were to blow up 11 airline flights
Manila police unravelled anti-U.S. `day of rage'
Aug. 11, 2006. 01:00 AM
CHARLES WALLACE
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Editor's note: This is an edited version of a story that appeared in the Star on May 28, 1995. The plot it describes is eerie in its parallels to that British authorities say they foiled yesterday.

MANILA—They called the project Bojinka, "the explosion."

Bojinka was a plan to blow up 11 American airliners over the Pacific in a day of rage at the United States.

Investigators who foiled the plan say it called for five Islamist terrorists to plant virtually undetectable bombs on jumbo jets in a synchronized plan.

The U.S. government has accused Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the Pakistani suspected of engineering the 1993 truck bombing of New York's World Trade Center — which killed six people and injured more than 1,000 — of masterminding the Bojinka plot.

(In 1998 a New York court sentenced Yousef, captured in Pakistan in February 1995, to 240 years in virtually solitary confinement.)

Also charged in the airliner plot is a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Hakim Murad, arrested by police in a Manila apartment Jan. 6, 1995. (Murad is also serving a life sentence in the U.S.)

Police said they found pipe bombs, bomb-making manuals and a computer detailing Bojinka on its hard disk.

Philippine officials acknowledge that thwarting Bojinka was tied to an accident Jan. 6, the day Yousef and Murad were mixing bomb material in an apartment sink in Manila when the mixture suddenly spewed smoke.

The authorities had been warned by overseas intelligence agencies that Muslim extremists would try to assassinate Pope John Paul II, who was to arrive a week after the fire. The apartment was 200 metres from the Papal Nunciature, the Vatican embassy in Manila where the pope would stay.

Horrified police found in the apartment Catholic vestments tailored to match clothes worn by the pope's entourage, down to the papal buttons. They also found pipe bombs, and maps of the papal schedule in Manila.

Police first thought the pope was the prime target; only after Murad was questioned and the computer disk decoded did details of Bojinka emerge.

Philippine authorities say they have evidence that Yousef carried out a practice run for Bojinka on Dec. 11, 1994, when a bomb exploded aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434 bound for Tokyo, killing a Japanese tourist seated near the explosive. Taped under a seat, it wounded 10 others.

Murad told authorities that Yousef, an engineering graduate of Britain's Swansea University, had created a stable, liquid form of nitroglycerine that he concealed in a bottle he used to hold saline solution for contact lenses.

Murad said Yousef locked himself in the plane's restroom to assemble his nitroglycerine bomb; taped under the life preserver below his seat, it was timed to go off when he wasn't aboard.

After planting their bombs, the five were to meet in Karachi, Pakistan.

August 11, 2006 at 08:28 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home