El Al's flight LY-444, bound for Tel Aviv, was ten minutes out of Rome last week when an explosion rocked the plane and flames came shooting up through the floor. "We are going to die!" someone screamed. "We will fall into the sea!" shouted another passenger. The blast had knocked a hole in the fuselage and the plane lost altitude, but Captain Yehuda Fuks managed to head the Boeing 707 back to Rome. Automatic sprinkler equipment doused the fire, and a few minutes later the plane landed safely with its 140 passengers.
The explosion was caused by a small time bomb hidden in a cassette player carried in the luggage compartment. The bomb had been timed to go off half an hour after takeoff, when the plane normally would have been flying in the rarefied atmosphere of 21,000 ft. The fact that the flight was 20 minutes late in leaving and had not attained its cruising altitude probably saved the passengers and crew; at a higher altitude sudden decompression might have caused the plane to disintegrate. Also, El Al's 707s have been equipped with reinforced cargo compartments.
Italian police traced the cassette player to two 18-year-old British girls, Ruth Watkin and Audrey Walton, who told a classic story of what not to do when in Rome. One afternoon shortly after they arrived, they said, they had been standing in the Piazza dei Cinquecento, when two young men struck up a conversation with them. The pair, Ahmed Zaid and Ziad Hashan, both in their 20s, spoke excellent English and offered to show the girls around.
For the next eleven days, said Ruth, "we lived like queens." The youths took them to "all the best restaurants and nightclubs." They went to the beach, where the girls took snapshots. Soon, Ruth and Audrey moved out of their pensione and into Zaid's apartment. There they spent a lot of time listening to pop music on the pink Philips cassette machine. The youths told the girls they were Iranians, then changed it to Pakistanis and finally to Indians. "We never did find out exactly where they came from," said Audrey. "The fact is we weren't asking too many questions."
One day Zaid and Hashan suggested that they all go to Israel. The youths bought four tickets on El Al's Flight LY-444, then said that they could not make it that day but the girls should go ahead, and they would all meet later.
As a "present and a pledge of friendship," they insisted that the girls take the cassette player, which meantime had been fitted with the bomb.
Hashan saw them to the airport, where the girls submitted to El Al's customarily tight security. Zaid and Hashan had told them not to declare the cassette as a gift because they would then have to pay a heavy tax. When security men asked them if they were carrying packages from or for anyone, the girls replied no. The cassette player was in a wicker basket, which El Al attendants would not allow in the cabin. But airline employees placed it in a cardboard box and sent it to the cargo compartment. That simple precaution probably prevented considerable bloodshed.