4 - Sunday, January 15, 1989 — North Shore News

HUNTER

«strictly personal © ©

SEVERAL YEARS ago, I happened to interview a New Zealand demolition

expert.

In retrospect, I believe the only reason he talked to me was because New Zealand had been effectively frozen out of the Western in- telligence-sharing network which includes Canada, the U.S. and Bri- tain.

It wasn’t until some time later that this came out. Both U.S. and British intelligence had picked up clues that French secret service agents were going to pull ‘‘some- thing’”’ in New Zealand.

But because the British and Americans were miffed at New Zealand's decision to ban ships carrying nuclear weapons, they kept their mouths shut.

Tie exact way in which the Air India jet was brought down has never been officially acknowledged. The fact that it fell into the ocean instead of on to a village made investigation nearly impossible. ’”

Thus, the Greenpeace flagship Raiabow Warrior was blown up and photographer Fernando

tially co-

headed it ho Siettike Kinin fed it 0 wi in-

telligen

ce,

Why Canada, which shares in- telligence with the U.K. and U.S., didn’t sey anything either is a met- ter we won't go into here.

What my informant in New Zealand had to say about the sub- ject of undetectable plastic ex- plosives was chilling in the ex- treme.

He told me that he “‘routinely”’

conferences all over the world on terrorism. His favorite schtick, once he was up on the po- dium, was to open up the briefcase he’d calmly carried through all the detection systems and explain its contents to the assembled experts he was addressing.

Lining the briefcase, you see, was a plastic-like substance that caused no alarms to ring, drew no attention, not even from trained dogs, and yet could cause a hor- rendous explosion.

As it turned out, the French didn’t use that particular substance in their attack on the Rainbow Warrior. They used mines, smug- gied in by sailboat.

What I learned from the demoli- tion expert takes on new mearing now, however.

Clearly, the material thet destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 and brought it crashing down on a hapless Scottish village, was a ver- sion of the very stuff the detective had warned me about so many

years before.

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Called Semtex, it is manufac- tured in Czechoslovakia in a state-owned factory, probably in eastern Bohemia.

The material has been around for some time.

And this raises an intriguing and terrible question.

For one thing, the media has been acting as if this stuff isn’t available in the West.

The media reports I have read on the subject since Semtex was first suspected in the Pan Am ex- plosion suggests that no such substance can be obtained by “our’’ guys.

While the United States has been manufacturing plastic explosives since the Second World War, go- ing back to a substance known as C-3, and other arms-producing na- tions have developed an improved version known as C-4, Semtex is supposed to be the only such plastic explosive to have defied bomb-sniffing dogs, X-ray machines and other devices, ac- cording to terrorism ‘‘experts’’ quoted in the papers.

That’s plainly a crock. The West has had this stuff for years.

Which gets me thinking about the unsolved, nearly identical destruction of the Air India flight out of Canada over the Atlantic a few years ago, which was at- tributed, at least by implication, to radical Sikhs, although nothing was ever proved.

The exact way in which the Air India jet was brought down has never been officially acknowl- edged. The fact that it fell into the ocean instead of on to a village made investigation nearly impossi- ble.

But, from what I have read of the reports on the Pan Am crash, the details — such as they are — of what happened to the jetliner while it was still in the sky are entirely consistent with the few details availabie about the doomed Air India flight.

The big, big difference is, assuming a similar plastic explosive which could get past all known metheds of detection was used, where did it come from? Not likely from Czechcslovakia, since India and the Soviet Union are close pais, and why would the Czechs help any enemy of India’s?

You see the potential of the plot thickening here, I'm sure.

It’s time someone raised some questions in the. House of Com- mons.

If the Pan Am flight was brought down by Semtex, what identical substance downed the Air India flight?

And, more to the point, who provided it?

If, in fact, Punjabi separatist ex- tremists were involved, where would they have gotten such a substance, if not from Czechoslovakia, Syria or Litva?

It would have had to be from somebody in the West, wouldn’t it? And who — irked by India's closeness to the Soviets — would have provided it? Not New Zealand, I’m sure @

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