The 'explosive cocktail' thing isn't that farfetched [View All]

[WilliamPitt]

It worked once before.

"Though details are still sketchy, the broad outlines of the foiled plot to bomb airliners plying the Atlantic are eerily reminiscent of a decade-old attempt by an al-Qaeda linked group to massacre hundreds of airline passengers — in that case aimed at U.S. airlines flying over the Pacific. That plot too targeted a dozen or so airliners and aimed to use a liquid explosive, a nitroglycerine-based concoction that was to have been smuggled on to the aircraft in hand-baggage. The plot, codenamed Bojinka — a play on the Serbo-Croatian word for explosion — by its Pakistani planners, came frighteningly close to fruition. In December of 1994, according to U.S. court documents, Ramzi Yousef and Wali Khan Amin Shah, were instrumental in the bombing of a Philippine airlines flight en route to Japan that was a dry run for their much more ambitious attempt to blow up a dozen jets simultaneously. They managed to smuggle a container of liquid explosive concealed in contact lens solution aboard the airplane on an earlier flight, leaving it under a seat in row 26. The explosion killed a Japanese man and forced the plane to make an emergency landing."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1225152,00.html?cnn=yes

James Bamford wrote about this incident in detail in his last book.