Airline bombing plot
The next plan would have involved at least five terrorists, including Yousef, Khan, Shah and two more unknown operatives. Starting on January 21, 1995 and ending on January 22, 1995, they would set the bombs on 11 United States-bound airliners that had stopovers all around
East Asia and
Southeast Asia. All of the flights had two legs. The bombs would be planted inside
life jackets under seats on the first leg, when each bomber would disembark. He would then board one or two more flights and repeat. After all of the bombers planted bombs on all of the flights, each man would then catch flights to
Lahore, Pakistan. The men never needed
U.S. visas, as they only would have been on the planes for their first legs in Asia.
United States airlines had been chosen instead of Asian airlines so as to maximize the shock toward Americans. The flights targeted were listed under operatives with codenames: "Zyed", "Majbos", "Markoa", "Mirqas" and "Obaid". Obaid, who was really
Abdul Hakim Murad, was to hit United flight 80, and then he was to go back to Singapore under another United flight which he would bomb.
[5][7][9]
Zyed, probably Ramzi Yousef, was to hit Northwest Flight 30, a United Flight going from Taipei to Honolulu, and a United Flight going from Bangkok to Taipei to San Francisco
[5][10]
The bombs would have been timed before the operatives stepped off the planes. The aircraft would have blown up over the
Pacific Ocean and the
South China Sea almost simultaneously. If this plan worked, several thousand would have perished, and and air travel would have been shut down worldwide for days, if not weeks. The U.S. government estimated the prospective death toll to be about 4,000 if the plot had been executed.
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