November 7, 2015
PARIS (AFP) - Several civilian airliners were destroyed by bomb attacks in the 1980s, but if it was the case in Egypt it would represent a rare event in recent years.
Here is a recap of such attacks.
- September 23, 1983: A Gulf Air Boeing 737 flying from Karachi, Pakistan to Abu Dhabi crashes shortly before landing after a bomb explodes in the bagage compartment. Six crew members and 105 passengers are killed. The attack is attributed in 2002 to the Palestinian Abu Nidal by one of his ex-aides.
- June 23 1985: An Air India Boeing 747 flying from Montreal to London crashes into the sea off Ireland with 329 people on board. There are no survivors. An Indian commission determines that militant Sikhs had planted a bomb in bagage being carried by the plane.
- November 29, 1987: A Boeing 707 from the South Korean airline KAL was flying from Baghdad to Seoul via Abu Dhabi when it disappeared into the sea off Myanmar with 115 people on board. A North Korean citizen, Kim Hyun-Hee, admits to planting a bomb on orders from authorities in Pyongyang, to sabotage the Seoul Olympic Games. She is condemned to death in 1990 but later pardoned by the South Korean government. North Korea denies having ordered the attack.
- December 21, 1988: A Pan Am Boeing 747 flying from London to New York explodes over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 270 people die, including 11 on the ground. In 2003, the Libyan government of Moamer Kadhafi officially takes responsibility for the attack and pays $2.7 billion in compensation to the victims' families. One man is convicted, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who dies in 2012, three years after Scottish officials free him on health grounds.
- September 19, 1989: A DC-10 from the French airline UTA flying from Brazzaville to Paris via N'Djamena, explodes over the Tenere desert in Niger. The crash kills 170 people. In 1999, a French court convicts six Libyan agents in connection with the attack, but Libya never acknowledges responsibility. Tripoli nonetheless accepts in 2004 to pay $170 million in compensation to victims' families.
- November 27, 1989: An Avianca Boeing 727 blows up shortly after taking off from Bogota, killing 111 people. In December 1994, a man suspected of working for the Medellin drug cartel is convicted of stashing a bomb on board the plane.
- More recently, on August 24, 2004, two Russian planes that had taken off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport crash almost simultaneously, one in the Tula region south of Moscow, and the other near Rostov-on-Don, southwest of the capital, killing 90 people.
Two female suicide bombers from the North Caucasus region managed to board the planes and the little-known Islamist group Islambouli Brigades claims responsibility, saying it acted in support of Chechen separatists.
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