Philippine Airlines Flight 434
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Philippine Airlines Flight 434 was the route designator of a flight that flew on a Ninoy Aquino International Airport near Manila, Philippines - Mactan-Cebu International Airport, Cebu - New Tokyo International Airport (Now Narita International Airport), Narita, Japan near Tokyo route. On December 11, 1994, Flight 434 was on its second leg from Cebu to Tokyo when a bomb exploded, killing one passenger.
Authorities later discovered that a passenger on the aircraft's preceding leg was Ramzi Yousef, who United States authorities have branded a master Al-Qaida bomber and terrorist. Yousef boarded the flight under an assumed name.
Yousef assembled a bomb in the lavatory and stuck it under Seat 27F on the right-hand side of the fuselage, setting the timer to explode the device four hours later. He and 25 other passengers left the plane at Cebu.
Two hours before e.t.a. at Tokyo, the bomb exploded at 11:43 P.M. while Flight 434 was at flight level FL310 above Minami Daito Island, which is located nearby Okinawa and is 260 miles (420 km) southwest of Tokyo. The explosion tore out a two square foot (0.2 m²) portion of the fuselage and ripped almost in half the body of 24-year old Haruki Ikegami, a Japanese businessman occupying the seat. He was an industrial sewing machine maker returning from a trip to Cebu. Flight attendants placed a blanket where his legs were, but Ikegami died a painful death.
EI-BWF, the Boeing 747-283B made an emergency landing in Naha, Okinawa, one hour after the bomb exploded. The pilots were barely able to land the plane. None of the aircraft's other 272 passengers or 20 crew members died, although 10 passengers sitting in front of Ikegami were injured.
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The bomb
US prosecutors said the device was a "Mark II" "microbomb" constructed using Casio digital watches as described in Phase I of Operation Bojinka of which this was a test. On Flight 434, Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January of 1995.
The aftermath
After the bombing, a man claiming to represent a rebel group said in a telephone call to the Manila office of the Associated Press, "We are Abu Sayyaf Group. We explode one plane from Cebu."
Ramzi Yousef was testing the bomb for use in the proposed Operation Bojinka terrorist attack. The bomb used on Flight 434 had one-tenth the power of the bombs he planned to use in the first phase of his project which was to bomb 11 aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.
Manila police uncovered his plan on the night of January 6 and the early morning of January 7, 1995, and Yousef was arrested a month later in Pakistan.
What happened to the flight?
Nowadays, flight 434 no longer originates in Manila, and is strictly a Cebu-Tokyo flight. Philippine Airlines also operates Manila-Tokyo.