Airplanes still targets of choice

WASHINGTON — For three decades, commercial airliners have been terrorist bombers' target of choice.

Thursday's foiled liquid-explosives plot in Britain was a vivid reminder that despite all the increased aviation security since Sept. 11, 2001, attacking a plane remains one of the surest ways to sow horror.

Terrorists of various political stripes attacked passengers and commandeered planes through much of the 1970s. For six days in the summer of 1976, terrorists held 258 Air France passengers hostage on a runway in Entebbe, Uganda, before Israeli commandos freed them in a nighttime raid.

The first large-scale bombing of a commercial aircraft occurred June 23, 1985, when a bomb exploded on an Air India plane bound for New Delhi, plunging the plane into the Atlantic Ocean and killing all 329 passengers.

On Dec. 21, 1988, a Libyan man backed by his government planted a bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, as it traveled from London to New York, killing 270 people. The perpetrators used a barometric detonator to set off a bomb hidden in a radio-cassette player.

In December 1999, Algerian Ahmed Ressam was arrested in Port Angeles after riding the ferry from Victoria, B.C. When they searched the trunk of his car, border guards found explosive liquids and powder and more than 100 pounds of fertilizer that can be used to make explosives, which he said were intended to bomb Los Angeles International Airport as part of a 2000 millennium attack plot.

The Sept. 11 attacks combined the air piracy of an earlier era with the Air India and Pan Am bombings by turning four hijacked jetliners into missiles, crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

June 22, 1985: Air India Flight 182 is blown up by a bomb put on board the flight from Canada by unknown terrorists. All 329 people on board are killed. At the time, it was the most deadly terrorist attack ever. A second Air India flight from Canada is targeted on the same day, but the bomb explodes at the Tokyo airport, in the luggage outside the aircraft. Two baggage handlers are killed, bringing the total death toll of the act to 331.

Dec. 21, 1988: Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 aboard and 11 people on the ground. At the time, it is the worst act of terrorism against the United States and among the worst acts of terrorism in European history. Eventually, Libya admits that two of its agents carried out the attack.

Sept. 19, 1989: A suitcase bomb destroys UTA Flight UT-772 en route to Paris, killing all 171 passengers and crew. Lybian intelligence involved.

Feb. 26, 1993: World Trade Center bombing kills six and injures more than 1,000 people, by coalition of five Islamic radical groups including Ramzi Yousef.

Dec. 11, 1994: A small bomb explodes aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434, killing a Japanese businessman. Authorities found out that Yousef planted the bomb to test it for another planned terrorist attack.

Jan. 6, 1995: Operation Bojinka plot to bomb 11 U.S. airliners is discovered on a laptop computer in a Manila, Philippines, apartment by authorities after a fire occurs in the apartment linked to Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Aug. 7, 1998: U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, kill 225 people and injure more than 4,000, by al-Qaida.

Dec. 14, 1999: Ahmed Ressam is arrested on the U.S.-Canada border in Port Angeles; he confessed to planning to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots.

Oct. 12, 2000: USS Cole bombing kills 17 U.S. sailors and wounds 40 off the port of Aden, Yemen, by al-Qaida.

Sept. 11, 2001: Hijacked airliners crash into two U.S. landmarks, killing 2,986: Al-Qaida is behind attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. A fourth plane, originally intended to hit an unknown but likely prominent Washington, D.C., target, crashes in Somerset County, Pa., after an apparent revolt against the hijackers by the plane's passengers.

Dec. 22, 2001: Richard Reid, attempting to destroy American Airlines Flight 63, is subdued by passengers and flight attendants before he can detonate his shoe bomb.

Oct. 12, 2002: Bali bombing kills 202 people, mostly Western tourists and local Balinese hospitality staff.

March 11, 2004: Coordinated bombing of commuter trains in Madrid, Spain, kills 191 people and injures more than 1,500.

July 7, 2005: Bombs explode on one London double-decker bus and three London underground trains, killing 56 people and injuring more than 700, occurring on the first day of the 31st Group of 8 conference. The attacks are believed by many to be the first suicide bombings in Western Europe.

Source: Wikipedia

"Airplanes captured the imagination of the terrorists both for symbolic and operational reasons," said Brian Jenkins, a RAND research-center analyst and author of a new book on combating terrorism. "They were symbols of nations and symbols of national policy when other targets were heavily guarded."

Charles Pena, a senior fellow at George Washington University's homeland-security institute, said the idea of attacking planes still appealed to terrorists because a successful bombing most likely killed a large number of people, grabbed world headlines and airwaves, and had the ripple effect of crippling the travel industry and causing other economic harm.

With some previous bombing methods blocked by security measures that have been installed since Sept. 11, Pena said, the alleged planners of the United Kingdom plot are suspected of turning to liquid explosives.

"Terrorists always go after the weak link," he said. "They saw this potential weak link in the aviation system. They're going to continue to look for potential weaknesses in aircraft security but not to the exclusion of other targets they might be interested in attacking."

Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at RAND, notes that it's typical of al-Qaida to go back to targets and improve their techniques on past attacks. The successful attack on the USS Cole in 2000 followed a failed bid to sink the USS Sullivan in 1999. The 9/11 attacks came eight years after the limited attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

This latest effort, he adds, is a carbon copy of the failed 1995 Bojinka plot by Ramzi Yousef, convicted of being the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, to blow up 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific, using plastic explosives.

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff also said the new plot was "reminiscent" of the plot partly hatched by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Yousef's uncle and the top al-Qaida operative who masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks.

That 1995 Bojinka plan was foiled when the plotters accidentally started a fire in a Manila apartment while mixing chemicals to make explosives. They had planned to pack nitroglycerine into Casio watches to make "microbombs," disembark at stopovers and use timers to set off the explosives while the planes were in flight.

Yousef, now serving a life sentence in federal prison in Colorado, tested that type of bomb in 1994, when he planted a smaller version on a Philippine Airlines flight bound for Japan, killing a Japanese businessman and injuring 10 other people. Investigators later discovered that Yousef, who had gotten off the plane in Cebu, had smuggled nitroglycerin aboard in a contact lens-solution bottle. The plane managed to land safely in Okinawa.

In 1987, a liquid explosive is believed to have brought down a South Korean passenger plane, killing all 115 on board. According to a suspect's confession, North Korean agents planted the bomb, which was concealed in an alcoholic drink bottle and detonated remotely.

In July 2005, terrorists attacked London's subway and bus system with bombs made of acetone and peroxide mixed in plastic containers. Those attacks claimed 52 lives and injured hundreds of others.

There have been dozens of thwarted plots around the world since the Sept. 11 attacks, and several were murderously successful. Suicide bombers killed 52 people in London on July 7, 2005, 58 in two attacks in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2003, and 202 in Bali, Indonesia, in 2002. Islamic radicals killed 191 people in Madrid, Spain, on March 11, 2004, then blew themselves up days later as police closed in.

Al-Qaida's failure to match the destruction it inflicted on Sept. 11 has led to speculation that a global dragnet that has forced leader Osama bin Laden into hiding and ensnared many of his most trusted deputies may have degraded al-Qaida's abilities.

But Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at Sweden's Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies who has done extensive research on al-Qaida's recruiting efforts in Europe, said the foiled plot in Britain "could very well have been an attempt at 'the Big One.' "

Rodolfo Mendoza, a police intelligence official in the Philippines, said the "modus operandi" is the same as al-Qaida has used in the past — and he should know.

Mendoza was among the law-enforcement officers involved in thwarting Yousef's plot in 1994.

Like al-Qaida's decadelong effort to bring down the World Trade Center, the latest plot to blow up commercial airliners reveals the group's unwavering resolve, Mendoza said.

"These people are obsessed," he said. "They will try and try and try again to accomplish their mission."

Compiled from McClatchy News Service, The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times archives.