Ninety Seconds Of Terror

Moscow releases documents on KAL 007 and a massacre of Poles

OVER AND OVER, IN ENGLISH, JAPANESE AND KOREAN, the voice on the passenger- cabin intercom repeated, "Urgent descent. Fasten seat belts. Put on masks." Those chilling words and others from the "black box" voice recorder, recovered from the wreckage of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, put to rest the nine-year-old question of whether the 269 passengers died instantly after Soviet fighters shot them out of the sky on Sept. 1, 1983. The crew's response to the disaster provided further evidence that they had no idea they had been attacked by air-to-air missiles. The transcripts of the tapes, made public in Moscow,...

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