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Inevitably, that left the horrific prospect that Flight 103 had been deliberately blown out of the skies. David Kyd, public relations director of the Geneva-based International Air Transport Association, noted the similarities between the Pan Am crash and that of an Air India 747 that disappeared into the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland in June 1985, killing all 329 people aboard. The subsequent investigation, aided by the underwater recovery of the plane's flight recorder, or "black box," determined that a bomb in the forward cargo hold had blown off the front section of the aircraft. Sikh extremists were suspected of the crime, but no one was ever charged. In the case of the Pan Am crash, Kyd said, "sabotage cannot be ruled out."
Adding credence to that possibility was the news that American embassies in Europe and the Middle East had received advisories from Washington more than a week earlier that a bomb threat had explicitly been made against Pan Am ( flights from Frankfurt to the U.S. The threat had come from an anonymous telephone caller to the American embassy in Helsinki. The tipster said a man in Frankfurt, identified only as Abdullah, planned to give a bomb to an accomplice named Yassan Garadad, who in turn would persuade an unwitting woman passenger to take the deadly package on board with her. The caller, who spoke with a Middle Eastern accent, claimed that Abdullah and Garadad were linked to Abu Nidal, the renegade Palestinian terrorist whose group has claimed responsibility for more than 100 vicious attacks.
Though the Finnish government subsequently said it knew the identity of the telephone tipster and did not take the warning seriously, the FAA was sufficiently concerned to advise all major U.S. carriers, including Pan Am, of the threat, though the news was not passed on to the general public. After the crash, some bereaved relatives of the victims expressed anger that neither the Government nor the airline had seen fit to caution the public. In response, Government agencies pointed out that they frequently receive warnings of terrorist activity, most of which are meaningless; in fact, more than 100 advisories of this kind have been sent to U.S. embassies since Sept. 1. To make a public announcement of such threats, the agencies contended, would serve no useful purpose.
British diplomats confirmed last week that the U.S. and Britain had received warnings from the Palestine Liberation Organization that Arab rejectionists, aroused by P.L.O. chairman Yasser Arafat's decision to acknowledge Israel's right to exist, were likely to punctuate their anger with an act of savagery. On Friday, after visiting Pope John Paul II in Rome, Arafat said that if sabotage had been behind the crash, "it is a criminal action we condemn."
Still another possibility was that Islamic extremists linked to Iran were involved. In London an anonymous caller to the Associated Press claimed that the Pan Am plane had been attacked in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus last July by the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, which mistook the passenger plane for an F-14 fighter. All 290 aboard perished.
If Pan Am Flight 103 was sabotaged, how was the crime carried out? Among the possibilities:
-- In Frankfurt a bomb was slipped into luggage checked through to New York, but its owner never boarded the connecting flight in London.