Bomb 'in aft end of plane’

Press, 29 January 1986, Page 10

Bomb 'in aft end of plane’

NZPA-Reuter New Delhi American and Indian aviation experts say that a bomb caused the crash of an Air-India jumbo jet off Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard. Harold Piper, an investigator with the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, told an official inquiry that a bomb had exploded in the rear of the Boeing 747 on June 23. Mr Piper said that his belief was based on the pattern of the wreckage scattered over the Atlantic sea-bed. “In my opinion there was an explosive device in the aft end of the aircraft,” he said. S. N. Seshadri, of the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre, in Bombay, also blamed a bomb. Asked by the lawyer for Boeing what he meant by "explosion” Dr Seshadri said, “An explosion is a thing that goes off very fast. An explosion means a bomb, a very fast device.” Two Sikh groups claimed responsibility for

planting a bomb on the flight from Toronto to Bombay. Two Indian reports presented to the inquiry, including one by B.A.R.C. scientists, have said that an explosion probably caused the crash. The draft of a Canadian Government report said a bomb probably was planted bn the flight. A British aviation expert, Ray Davis, told the inquiry on Thursday that an analysis of the cockpit voice-recorder had produced no evidence of a bomb. “The only conclusion we could come to was that the sounds were almost identical to the sounds of another recording of explosive decompression (in a plane crash),” he said. Mr Piper, a veteran of 35 air crash investigations who retired from Boeing last month, said that the aircraft had broken up at a very high altitude after the blast scattering wreckage over a wide area. The rear of the plane had shattered into fragments.