1994 Bojinka, Philippine Airlines Flight 434

Philippine Airlines Flight 434 (PAL434, PR434) was the route designator of a flight from Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Pasay City, the Philippines, to New Tokyo International Airport (now Narita International Airport), Narita near Tokyo, Japan, with one stop at Mactan-Cebu International Airport, Cebu, the Philippines.

On December 11, 1994 the Boeing 747-283B, tail number EI-BWF, was flying on the second leg of the route, from Cebu to Tokyo, when a bomb planted by terrorist Ramzi Yousef exploded, killing one passenger. It was a part of the unsuccessful Bojinka terrorist attacks. Captain Eduardo “Ed” Reyes, an experienced veteran pilot, was able to land the aircraft, saving the plane and all the remaining passengers and crew. The flight crew also consisted of First Officer Jaime Herrera and Systems Engineer Dexter Comendador.

Authorities later discovered that a passenger on the aircraft’s preceding leg was Ramzi Yousef. He was later convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef boarded the flight under the fake Italian name “Armaldo Forlani”, an incorrect spelling of the name of the Italian legislator Arnaldo Forlani.

Setting the bomb

Yousef boarded the aircraft for the Manila to Cebu leg of the flight. After the plane was airborne, he went into the lavatory with his dopp kit in hand and took off his shoes to get out the batteries, wiring, and spark source hidden in the heel (below a level where metal detectors in use at the time could detect anything). Yousef removed an altered Casio digital watch from his wrist to be used as a timer, unpacked the remaining materials from his dopp kit, and assembled his bomb. He set the timer for four hours later, which was approximately the time at which the plane would be far out over the ocean en route to Tokyo, put the entire bomb back into his dopp kit, and returned to his current seat.

After asking a flight attendant for permission to move to seat 26K, saying he could get a better view from that seat, Yousef moved to that seat and tucked the assembled bomb into the life vest pocket under that seat. He exited the aircraft in Cebu.Philippine domestic flight attendant Maria dela Cruz noticed that Yousef had switched seats during the course of the Manila to Cebu flight and got off the plane in Cebu with the rest of the domestic flight crew, but did not pass the information along to the international flight crew that boarded at Cebu for the trip to Tokyo. 25 other passengers also got off the plane at Cebu, where 256 more passengers and a new cabin crew boarded the plane for the final leg of the flight to Tokyo.

Explosion

After a 38-minute delay the flight took off with a total of 273 passengers on board and 24-year old Haruki Ikegami (池上春樹 Ikegami Haruki^?), a Japanese industrial sewing machine maker returning from a business trip to Cebu, occupying 26K. Four hours after Yousef planted his bomb, the device exploded underneath Ikegami, killing him and injuring an additional 10 passengers in adjacent seats in front of and behind seat 26K.The blast blew a hole in the floor, and the cabin’s rapid expansion from the explosion severed several control cables in the ceiling, which controlled the plane’s right aileron, as well as cables that connected to both the pilot and first officer’s steering controls.Fortunately, this particular 747, formerly operated by Scandinavian Airlines, had a different seating configuration and seat 26K was two rows forward of the center fuel tank so that the hole in the floor punched through to the cargo hold instead and spared the plane from a fiery explosion.

The bomb’s orientation, positioned front-to-back and upward angled from horizontal, caused the blast to expand vertically and lengthwise.This configuration meant that Ikegami’s body absorbed most of the blast force and the plane’s outer structure was spared.The lower half of his body fell into the cargo hold and ten passengers sitting in the seats in front of and behind Ikegami were also injured; one needed urgent medical care.The bomb tore out a two square foot (0.2 m²) portion of the cabin floor, revealing the cargo hold underneath, but the fuselage of the plane stayed intact.Additionally, the 38-minute delay in takeoff from Cebu meant the plane was not as far out to sea as anticipated, which contributed to the captain’s options available for an emergency landing.

Masaharu Mochizuki, a passenger on the flight, recalled that passengers, both injured and uninjured, initially tried to move away from the blast site, but cabin crew told passengers to remain where they were until an assessment of the situation could be made.^[2] The chief economy class flight attendant, Fernando Bayot, moved an injured passenger named Yukihiko Osui away from the bomb site. Bayot then saw Ikegami and tried to pull him out of the hole, but soon realized that most of Ikegami’s body below the waist was either damaged or missing entirely. Ikegami died minutes later. Bayot called another flight attendant over to pretend to minister to Ikegami’s needs with a blanket and oxygen mask in order to prevent additional panic, then reported the extent of the passenger injuries to the cockpit.Cabin crew members* – who were later commended by President Fidel Ramos for their “professional handling of a potentially disastrous situation” along with the flight deck crew – were Flight Purser Isidro Mangahas, Jr., Flight Stewards Fernando Bayot, Agustin Azurin, Ronnie Macapagal, E. Reyes, R. Santiago, Flight Attendants M. Alvar, Alpha Nicolasin, Cynthia Tengonciang, Andre Palma, Socorro Mendoza, E. Co, L. Garcia, N. dela Cruz, Adora Altarejos, L. Abella and Japanese Interpreter K. Okada. (* Manila Bulletin, December 18, 1994)

Landing

Immediately after the explosion, the aircraft banked hard to the right but the autopilot quickly corrected the bank.After the blast, Reyes asked Comendador to survey the blast site to check for damage. Reyes placed the Mayday call requesting landing at Naha Airport, Okinawa Island, Okinawa Prefecture.The Japanese air traffic controller experienced difficulty in trying to understand Reyes’s request, so an American air traffic controller from a United States military base on Okinawa took over and processed Reyes’s landing.The autopilot had stopped responding to Reyes’s commands and the aircraft flew past Okinawa.

Reyes said in an interview for the Canadian TV series Mayday that when he disengaged the autopilot he feared that the aircraft would bank right again and the crew would lose control of the aircraft; however, because of the pressing need to land quickly to attend to the injured and inspect the plane for additional damage, Reyes instructed Herrera to take hold of his own controls and then Reyes deactivated the autopilot.The aircraft did not bank after the disengagement of the autopilot, but neither would it respond to steering inputs from either controller due to the control cable damage caused by the bomb. The crew struggled to use the ailerons which could allow the aircraft to turn but still were unable to change the plane’s direction. Finally the flight crew disengaged the auto-throttles and resorted to steering via throttle control reminiscent of United Airlines Flight 232.

By using the throttles to steer the plane, reducing air speed to both control the radius of turns and to allow the plane to descend, and dumping fuel to lessen the strain on the landing gear,the captain landed the damaged Boeing 747-283B at Naha Airport at 12:45 p.m., one hour after the bomb exploded.The aircraft’s other 272 passengers and 20 crew members survived.

The bomb

United States prosecutors said the device was a “Mark II” “microbomb” constructed using Casio digital watches as described in Phase I of the Bojinka plot, for which this was a test. On Flight 434, Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January 1995.The bomb was, or at least all of its components were, designed to slip through airport security checks undetected. The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid. Other ingredients included glycerin, nitrate, sulfuric acid, and minute concentrations of nitrobenzene, silver azide, and liquid acetone.The wires he used were hidden in the heel of his shoe, below the detectable range of the metal detectors used by airports of the day.[

1993 World Trade Center bombing

The World Trade Center bombing occurred on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, NY. The 1,336 lb (606 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower (Tower One) into the South Tower (Tower Two), bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people.

It failed to do so, but did kill six people and injured more than a thousand.The attack was planned by a group of conspirators including Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal A. Ayyad, Abdul Rahman Yasin and Ahmad Ajaj. They received financing from Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Yousef’s uncle.

In March 1994, four men were convicted of carrying out the bombing: Abouhalima, Ajaj, Ayyad and Salameh. The charges included conspiracy, explosive destruction of property and interstate transportation of explosives. In November 1997, two more were convicted: Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the bombings, and Eyad Ismoil, who drove the truck carrying the bomb.

Planning and organization

Ramzi Yousef, who was born as Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim in Kuwait, spent time at Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan,^[5] before beginning in 1991 to plan a bombing attack within the United States. Yousef’s uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Ali Fadden, who later was considered the principal architect of the September 11 attacks, gave him advice and tips over the phone, and funded him with a US$1,400 wire transfer.

Yousef arrived illegally in the United States on September 1, 1992, traveling with Ahmed Ajaj from Pakistan, though both sat apart on the flight and acted as though they were traveling separately. Ajaj tried to enter with a forged Swedish passport, though it had been altered and thus raised suspicions among INS officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport. When officials put Ajaj through secondary inspection, they discovered bomb making instructions and other materials in his luggage, and arrested him. The name Abu Barra, an alias of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, appeared in the manuals. Yousef tried to enter with a false Iraqi passport, claiming political asylum. Yousef was allowed into the United States, and was given a hearing date.

Yousef set up residence on Nicole Pickett Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey, traveled around New York and New Jersey and called Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a controversial blind Muslim cleric, via cell phone. After being introduced to his co-conspirators by Abdel Rahman at the latter’s Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, Yousef began assembling the 1,500 lb (680 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device for delivery to the WTC. He ordered chemicals from his hospital room when injured in a car crash – one of three accidents caused by Salameh in late 1992 and early in 1993.

El Sayyid Nosair, one of the blind sheikh’s men, was arrested in 1991 for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane. According to prosecutors, “the Red” Mahmud Abouhalima, also convicted in the bombing, told Wadih el Hage to buy the .357 caliber revolver used by Nosair in the Kahane shooting. In the initial court case in NYS Criminal Court Nosair was acquitted of murder but convicted of gun charges (in a related and follow-up case in Federal Court, he was convicted). Dozens of Arabic bomb-making manuals and documents related to terrorist plots were found in Nosair’s New Jersey apartment, with manuals from Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, secret memos linked to Joint Chiefs of Staff, and 1,440 rounds of ammunition. (Lance 2004 26)

Yousef’s view of the attack

According to the journalist Steve Coll, Yousef mailed letters to various New York newspapers just before the attack, in which he claimed he belonged to ‘Liberation Army, Fifth Battalion’.These letters made three demands: an end to all US aid to Israel, an end to US diplomatic relations with Israel, and a pledge by the United States to end interference “with any of the Middle East countries’ interior affairs.” He stated that the attack on the World Trade Center would be merely the first of such attacks if his demands were not met. In his letters Yousef admitted that the World Trade Center bombing was an act of terrorism, but this was justified because “the terrorism that Israel practices (which America supports) must be faced with a similar one.”

The attack

On Friday, February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef and a Jordanian friend, Eyad Ismoil, drove a yellow Ryder van into Lower Manhattan, and pulled into the public parking garage beneath the World Trade Center around noon. They parked on the underground B-2 level. Yousef ignited the 20-foot fuse, and fled. Twelve minutes later, at 12:17:37 pm, the bomb exploded in the underground garage, generating an estimated pressure of 150,000 psi.The bomb opened a 30-m (98 ft) wide hole through four sublevels of concrete. The detonation velocity of this bomb was about 15,000 ft/s (4.5 km/s). Initial news reports indicated a main transformer may have blown, not realizing a bomb had exploded in the basement.

The bomb instantly cut off the World Trade Center’s main electrical power line, knocking out the emergency lighting system. The bomb caused smoke to rise up to the 93rd floor of both towers, including through the stairwells which were not pressurized.With thick smoke filling the stairwells, evacuation was difficult for building occupants and led to many smoke inhalation injuries. Hundreds were trapped in elevators in the towers when the power was cut, including a group of 17 kindergartners, on their way down from the South Tower observation deck, who were trapped between the 35th and 36th floors for five hours.

Also as a result of the loss of power most of New York City’s radio and television stations lost their over-the-air broadcast signal for almost a week, with television stations only being able to broadcast via cable and satellite via a microwave hookup between the stations and three of the New York area’s largest cable companies, Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable. Telephone service for much of Lower Manhattan was also disrupted.

All together, six people were killed and 1,042 others injured, most during the evacuation that followed the blast. A report from the US Fire Administration states that “Among the scores of people who fled to the roofs of the towers, 28 with medical problems were airlifted by New York City police helicopters (…)“. It is known that 15 people received traumatic injury from the blast and 20 complained of cardiac problems. One firefighter was hospitalized, while 87 others, 35 police officers, and an EMS worker were also injured in dealing with the fires and other aftermath.

The plan was that if the bomb truck was parked at the right place, the North Tower would fall onto the South Tower, collapsing them both. However, the tower did not collapse, according to Yousef’s plan, but the garage was severely damaged in the explosion. Nevertheless, had the van been parked closer to the WTC’s poured concrete foundations, Yousef’s plan might have succeeded.He escaped to Pakistan several hours after the bombing.

Due to the time at which Yousef left Jersey City, questions linger as to why he waited until noon to attack when the parking area was much less crowded.Conspirator Mahmud Abouhalima later stated that the original plan was to attack the United Nations headquarters earlier in the morning. Author Simon Reeve theorized that something went wrong, such as Yousef encountering too much security, and the target was changed to be the World Trade Center.

Bomb characteristics

Yousef was assisted by Iraqi bomb maker Abdul Rahman Yasin, who helped assemble the complex 1,310-pound (590 kg) bomb, which was made of a urea nitrate main charge with aluminum, magnesium and ferric oxide particles surrounding the explosive. The charge used nitroglycerine, ammonium nitrate dynamite, smokeless powder and fuse as booster explosives.Three tanks of bottled hydrogen were also placed in a circular configuration around the main charge, to enhance the fireball and afterburn of the solid metal particles.The use of compressed gas cylinders in this type of attack closely resembles the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing 10 years earlier. Both of these attacks used compressed gas cylinders to create fuel-air and thermobaric bombs^[18] that release more energy than conventional high explosives. According to testimony in the bomb trial, only once before the 1993 attack had the FBI recorded a bomb that used urea nitrate.

The Ryder van used in the bombing had 295 cubic feet (8.4 m³) of space, which would hold up to 2,000 pounds (910 kg) of explosives. However, the van was not filled to capacity. Yousef used four 20 ft (6 m) long fuses, all covered in surgical tubing. Yasin calculated that the fuse would trigger the bomb in twelve minutes after he had used a cigarette lighter to light the fuse.

Yousef wanted the smoke to remain in the tower, therefore catching the public eye by smothering people inside, killing them slowly. He anticipated Tower One collapsing onto Tower Two after the blast.

There remains a popular belief that there was cyanide in the bomb, which is reinforced by Judge Duffy’s statement at sentencing, “You had sodium cyanide around, and I’m sure it was in the bomb.” However, the bomb’s true composition was not able to be ascertained from the crime scene and Robert Blitzer, a senior FBI official who worked on the case, stated that there was “no forensic evidence indicating the presence of sodium cyanide at the bomb site.” Furthermore, Yousef is said only to have considered adding cyanide to the bomb, and to have regretted not doing so in Peter Lance’s book 1000 Years for Revenge.

Investigation

Though the cause of the blast was not immediately known, with some suspecting a transformer explosion, agents and bomb technicians from the ATF, FBI, and the NYPD quickly responded to the scene. The magnitude of the explosion was far beyond that of a transformer explosion.

In the days after the bombing, investigators surveyed the damage and looked for clues. While combing through the rubble in the underground parking area, a bomb technician located some internal component fragments from the vehicle that delivered the bomb. A vehicle identification number (VIN), found on a piece from an axle, gave investigators crucial information that led them to a Ryder truck rental outlet in Jersey City. Investigators determined that the vehicle had been rented by Mohammad Salameh, one of Yousef’s co-conspirators.Salameh had reported the van stolen, and when he returned on March 4, 1993, to get his deposit back, authorities arrested him.

Salameh’s arrest led police to the apartment of Abdul Rahman Yasin in Jersey City, New Jersey, which Yasin was sharing with his mother, in the same building as Ramzi Yousef’s apartment. Yasin was taken to the FBI’s Newark field office in Newark, New Jersey, and was then released. The next day, he flew back to Iraq, via Amman, Jordan. Yasin was later indicted for the attack, and in 2001 he was placed on the initial list of the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists, on which he remains today. He disappeared before the U.S. coalition invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom, in 2003. In March 1994, Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima and Ahmad Ajaj were each convicted in the World Trade Center bombing. In May 1994, they were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The capture of Salameh and Yasin led authorities to Ramzi Yousef’s apartment, where they found bomb-making materials and a business card from Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. Khalifa was arrested on December 14, 1994, and was deported to Jordan by the INS on May 5, 1995. He was acquitted by a Jordanian court and lived as a free man in Saudi Arabia until his death in 2007. In 2002, it was made public that Yasin, the only person involving in the bombing who was never caught by US authorities,was being held as a prisoner on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq since 1994. When journalist Leslie Stahl interviewed him there for a segment on 60 Minutes on May 23, 2002 Yasin appeared in prison pajamas and handcuffs.^[23] Yasin has not been heard from since the interview.