The Bojinka plot revisited: Airline bombing plot was first hatched in Manila

Since international commentators, including our own terrorism expert Maria Ressa (who now works for ABS-CBN, but did a cameo return-telecast on her old outfit, CNN), have been mentioning it all over the world, the first inkling Islamic terrorists would be targeting aircraft flying to the United States was uncovered in 1995 right here in Manila.

The plot was discovered, not by any brilliant police or intelligence sleuthing but entirely by accident. Most people who’ve read of him, his capture in Pakistan, and his being sentenced by Judge Kevin Duffy in a US court to 240 years in prison, in complete solitary, without hope of pardon or parole, know of this monster, Ramzi Yousef, one of Osama bin Laden’s chief bomb-makers. Yousef had, in fact, tried to blow up the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. Ramzi used a cheap cigarette lighter to ignite his four 20 ft.-long fuses, giving him 13 minutes to escape before his rented van exploded in the basement car park of the World Trade Center. The huge explosion ripped upwards through five reinforced concrete floors – but the tower did not collapse as Yousef had hoped. Nonetheless six people died, and 1,042 injured.

Yousef was finally captured on February 7, 1995, betrayed by an informer, in a cheap hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. Pakistani special forces and American DEA agents barged into Room 16 and grabbed the terrorist. After he was flown back to the US, as an FBI helicopter brought him to prison in irons and under heavy guard, their chopper passed by the Twin Towers. "The next time," Yousef brooded, "we’ll use a bigger bomb."

Indeed, the next time, his confederates in al-Qaeda, with 19 Arab hijackers implementing the well-planned maneuver, two American airliners – fully loaded with tons of aviation fuel – were smashed into Tower 1 and 2. Osama’s plotters had discovered that a completely-fueled jetliner crashed into its target on 9/11 2001, was the "bigger bomb" itself.

The Twin Towers collapsed at Ground Zero with such terrible intensity of flame and melted steel that when this writer arrived there almost a week later, Ground Zero was still smoking, and all over clung, with cloying persistence, the smell of death.

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In sum, the conspiracy just uncovered in Britain to mix liquid bombs onboard and suicide-bomb at least 10 airliners flying from London’s airports, principally Heathrow, to the US, are just a "refinement" of Ramzi Yousef’s original "Bojinka Plot."

Yousef’s original scheme, discovered in the computer laptop belonging to him after he had abandoned it after his apartment caught fire in Manila outlined, below the heading Bojinka, a scheme under which five men in his group would plant bombs timed to explode simultaneously on 11 US airliners over the Pacific.

If successful, it had been calculated, the operation would have caused the deaths of up to 4,000 passengers and crew flying them from Asia to the US and "almost certainly shut down the airline industry."

In his astonishing, diabolically-conceived plan, each of Yousef’s five terrorists even had a code-name. (1) ‘Mirqas’ was to plant a bomb on a United Airlines flight, from Manila to Seoul and leave the flight in South Korea. The aircraft, proceeding to San Francisco, would explode over the Pacific. Mirqas would further plant a bomb on a Delta flight from Seoul to Taipei, which would explode on the next leg of the flight to Bangkok, but by then, Mirqas would have left the plane and flown away to safety, then home to Karachi, Pakistan.

(2) "Markoa" would plant a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo, then get off the plane. The plane was "timed" to blow up while enroute onwards to Chicago. In the interim, Markoa would have boarded a Northwest flight from Tokyo (Narita) to Hong Kong and planted a bomb timed to explode over the Pacific as the plane was on its way to New York City. Markoa, getting off in Hong Kong, would fly to Singapore and then home to Pakistan.

(3) "Obaid" was to plant a bomb on the United Airlines flight from Singapore to Hong Kong, which would detonate when the aircraft was flying onwards to Los Angeles. Obaid, having exited, would then board another United flight bound from Hong Kong to Singapore and embedded a bomb timed to explode on the return leg to Hong Kong. Exiting the plane after the second bomb-planting, Obaid would then fly directly home from Singapore. Home where? To Pakistan, of course.

(4) Terrorist "Majbos" would board the United Airlines flight from Taipei to Tokyo and leave a bomb set to go off as the airliner headed onwards to Los Angeles. He would later fly from Tokyo to Hong Kong and conceal a bomb abroad another United airlines flight, set to explode as the jet flew from Tokyo to New York.

(5) "Zyed" was slated to fly by Northwest to Seoul, hide a bomb under his seat and descend from the aircraft – the bomb would then detonate on the Seoul to Los Angeles portion. It is believed that "Zyed" was Yousef himself. Flying on to Taipei on United, "Zyed" would plant a bomb set to explode on the Taipei-Honolulu portion of the flight. "Zyed" would then fly to Bangkok on United, and leave the plane in Bangkok, after having concealed a bomb which would explode when the same aircraft was flying onwards to San Francisco. The terrorist would then fly to Karachi (Pakistan).

Interesting? By coincidence, almost all of the 24 suspects rounded up by the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard and Britain’s domestic intelligence M-15, were British citizens of Pakistani origin, though three were described as recent converts to Islam. Three of the four young suicide-bombers who exploded bombs on the Tube (the London underground train system) and on a bus in July last year were British citizens, born and raised in Britain, but of Pakistani-origin. From Bojinka to today’s headline-hugging conspiracy, which has disrupted travel not only in London’s airports, particularly Heathrow – raised the alert-level in the United Kingdom to "critical" (meaning most serious) and, for the first time, the alert-level in the United States to "Red" (previously, Homeland Security had confined alert warnings to Orange) – what’s been the common denominator? Pakistan.

The Yousef blueprint, however, did not envision himself or any of his cohorts as suicide-bombers. (He obviously felt that he who plants bombs and runs away, lives to plant more bombs another day). Today, the youthful Pakistani-Brits and their confederates are into martyrdom through suicide-bombing.

All the juicy details about Bojinka and Yousef’s activities, I’ll have to credit to a brilliant book written by investigative journalist Simon Reeve, a former staff writer for the Sunday Times and contributor to Time and Esquire Magazine.

The volume, entitled "The New Jackals": Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism," was published by Northeastern University Press, Boston, in 1999 – long before September 11, 2001. If US intelligence, the CIA, the FBI and the 14 American intelligence agencies had paid closer attention to the laptop of Yousef seized in 1995 in Manila, they might have "prevented" the tragedy of 9/11 by making certain no US commercial jetliners were hijacked – by golly, right in American airspace at that!

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What’s today’s conspiracy supposed to be about? Blowing up US-bound commercial jetliners over the Atlantic. Ramzi Yousef’s Bojinka plan had plotted the exploding of commercial jetliners headed for the US over the Pacific. Almost a reverse-mirror of the same conspiracy, wouldn’t you say?

The terrorist-planners, at least, have scored a partial victory. They have thrown airports in Britain, especially Heathrow and Gatwick, into a turmoil and severely damaged the airline industry, as Yousef had hoped to accomplish as collateral damage in his 1993 scheme.

Our NAIA has also been drastically affected. All passengers bound for the United States yesterday were barred from carrying on "liquids" (shaving lotions, creams, liquor – anything liquid which might have been mixed into making a bomb while on board the US-bound flights). I hear, though, that a number of tipplers managed to sneak their alcohol on board, through laxity or friendly "connections" – so let’s cut out that nonsense. Right now, better safe than sorry.

In fact, the United States’ Transportation Security Agency (TSA) rushed a supervisor over here, a lady named Burt Williams, who’s taken over security checks.

Those security-minders truly play rough – believe me. Almost two years ago, flying from Washington’s airport to Salt Lake City, Utah, my wife – mind you on diplomatic passport – and this writer, on ordinary Saluyot-type RP Passport, got singled out by the TSA, who went through everything, I mean everything, while other passengers filed by, looking at us askance, as though a couple of would-be terrorists had been apprehended.

If you’re a Pinoy, perhaps you’re regarded as a risk. At the risk of offending our Muslim brethren from Mindanao (and Greenhills), I might say we’re occasionally lumped with the worldwide Islamic umma, since a percentage of us are Muslims and everybody’s heard of that kidnapping, torturing, beheading bunch, the Abu Sayyaf. In vain might I have pleaded that I’m an Ilocano Catholic (not of the most religious variety, admittedly) not Abu Bakr Max bin Benito of the Beni Sadr. The TSA show no mercy and have absolutely no sense of humor – but, in the end, who can blame those paranoids after 9/11.

Who could have suspected that the hijackers, some of them college graduates and even postgraduate students in Germany and in the US, would have rammed themselves (and the hapless airplane passengers) into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon?

Right now, the Muslim neighbors, classmates and friends of the 24 arrested in London and the Thames Valley are in a state of angry denial. They’re accusing the British government of bias and of arresting innocent kids. One of their friends was on TV yesterday attesting his friends arrested wouldn’t harm a fly, were such mild-mannered, even-tempered types, were interested only in football or their studies. Relatives swore on stacks of Korans that the suspects were fine upstanding kids, completely incapable of wrongdoing.

Yep. And the guy who betrayed Jesus was Judas Iscariot, one of his handpicked Apostles, and even the "treasurer" of the Lord’s movement. In the Holy Book, the Bible, the Devil was one of God’s brightest Angels – Lucifer, who turned out to be, well – rebellious. Non serviam, Lucifer had roared – better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven.

You bet. Those nice boys might have learned to mix those liquid bombs and detonate them as a service to Allah, and a ticket to paradise. Who knows what lurks in the deepest recesses of the human heart?

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Summing up, terrorist Ramzi Yousef’s favorite staging ground turned out to have been the Philippines – perhaps because here you can get away with almost anything. The story has already been told of his first experiment – of how he had exploded a bomb on a Philippine Airlines plane, bound from Cebu to Japan. The bomb did explode, but it killed only one passenger, a Japanese – and the gallant PAL pilot managed to wrestle the heavily-damaged PAL plane to a safe landing.

On December 8, 1994, Yousef had moved into a rented room in the Doña Josefa Apartment building, a six-storey, 60-room building at 711 President Quirino Boulevard. He had planned to assassinate US President Bill Clinton when the American chief executive visited Manila on November 12, 1994, at the start of Clinton’s five-day tour of Asia. However, he found the security cordon around Clinton too tight, so he scrapped the idea and went to Plan B, the Bojinka plot (which is Serbo-Croat meaning "the explosion.") Why he chose a Serbo-Croat name is unexplained, since Yousef himself was Kuwaiti-born.

He had booked himself into room 603 of the Doña Josefa posing as Naji Owaida Haddad, a mechanical engineer from Morocco. His fall-back target would be the Holy Father – Pope John Paul II who was scheduled to arrive in Manila in mid-January 1995. In the meantime, a colleague named Murad had joined him.

In the apartment, Yousef and Murad would experimentally mix chemicals in a cooking pot. In their raw state, alas, the chemicals they utilized could explode, ignite or release poisonous fumes. This happened at 10:40 p.m. on January 6. The entire brew ignited and caught fire. The two men fled into the corridor, but smoke began pouring out into the hall arousing the suspicions of the security men in the building.

A guard named Mariano rushed into the room to investigate, and his eyes stung from the fumes. Rushing out to collar the two men, he found they had disappeared – they had fled. Outside, Yousef remembered he had left behind his valuable, tattle-tale laptop. Persuading Murad to go back to retrieve it, he waited outside. Instead, Murad got apprehended, and all the burnt-out apartment’s contents seized.

Alas, the Manila police, investigating the seized laptop uncovered Yousef’s manuals and files, many of his aliases, and the damned Bojinka blueprint. Why a smart fellow like Yousef had foolishly detailed everything in a poorly encrypted form in his laptop remains mystifying – but there you were: a plot discovered by accident.

God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. This time, Allah was not on Yousef’s side.

US intelligence, the FBI, DEA and Australian intelligence poured over the laptop’s revelations with interest. In it, along with other information, they learned how Yousef had found you could mix the most harmless liquids into a potent bomb – exactly the formula now uncovered in Britain’s own terrorist conspiracy. That crazed genius of bin Laden’s bunch had obviously led the way.

After all, had not that redneck from America’s own group of crazies destroyed the entire front of the federal building in Oklahoma, utilizing as his mega-bomb nothing more than fertilizer and a few chemicals?

In short, terrorists have acquired the "smarts" about sneaking bombs into any facility which are undetectable.

Gee whiz. When we saw these methods in the old comic books, like Batman, Superman, Dick Tracy, etc., we thought they were culled only from the fertile minds of the cartoonists. They are now reality – and they’re not comic.