Kashmir Princess

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Kashmir Princess
Summary
Date April 11, 1955
Type Airliner bombing
Site Natuna Islands, Indonesia
Passengers 11
Crew 8
Injuries Unknown
Fatalities 16
Survivors 3
Aircraft type Lockheed L-749A Constellation
Aircraft name Kashmir Princess
Operator Air India
Tail number VT-DEP

The Kashmir Princess was a Lockheed L-749A Constellation aircraft owned by Air India which exploded in midair and crashed into the Pacific Ocean on April 11, 1955 while en route from Bombay, India and Hong Kong to Jakarta, Indonesia following a bomb explosion. Sixteen of those on board were killed, while three survived.

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[edit] Crash

The aircraft departed Hong Kong at 0425 GMT carrying Chinese and Eastern European delegates, mainly journalists, to the Asia-Afro Bandung Conference in Jakarta. At approximately 0925 GMT the crew heard an explosion; smoke quickly entered the cabin from a fire on the right wing directly behind the No. 3 (or right inboard) engine. Upon hearing the explosion and seeing the fire-warning light for the baggage compartment come on, the captain shut off the No. 3 engine and feathered its propeller, fearing the engine would catch on fire. This left three engines running. The crew sent out three distress signals giving their position over the Natuna Islands before the radio went dead.

The captain tried to land the plane on the sea, but the depressurizing cabin and the failing circuits made that impossible. Additionally, smoke was seeping into the cockpit. Left with no other options, the crew issued life jackets and opened the emergency doors to ensure a quick escape as the plane plunged into the sea below.

The starboard wing struck water first, tearing the plane into three parts. The flight engineer, navigator and first officer escaped and were later found by the Indonesian Coast Guard. The remaining 16 passengers and crew members, however, drowned at sea.

Investigators believed that the explosion had been caused by a time bomb placed aboard the aircraft by a Kuomintang secret agent who was attempting to assassinate Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who had been scheduled to board the plane to attend the conference but had changed his travel plans at the last minute.

[edit] Passengers

Passengers of the chartered flight included three staff members of the Chinese delegation to the Bandung Conference and one staff member of the delegation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The rest of the passengers were journalists — five from China, one from Poland, and one from Austria. Huang Zuomei, the Hong Kong branch director of Xinhua News Agency, was also on the aircraft.

[edit] Zhou Enlai

The target of the assassination, Zhou Enlai, had planned to fly from Beijing to Hong Kong and then on to Jakarta on Kashmir Princess. An emergency appendectomy delayed his arrival in Hong Kong; he left China three days after the crash and flew to Rangoon to meet with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Burmese Prime Minister U Nu before continuing on to Bandung to attend the conference.

Some historians have argued that Zhou may have known about the assassination plot beforehand and that the premier did not undergo an appendectomy at the time. Steve Tsang of Oxford University wrote in the September 1994 edition of China Quarterly, "Evidence now suggests that Zhou knew of the plot beforehand and secretly changed his travel plans, though he did not stop a decoy delegation of lesser cadres from taking his place."

[edit] Investigation

The day after the crash, China's Foreign Ministry issued a statement that described the bombing as "a murder by the special service organizations of the United States and Chiang Kai-shek" while Hong Kong Governor Sir Alexander Grantham maintained that the plane was not tampered with in Hong Kong. However, on May 26, an Indonesian board of inquiry later announced that a time bomb with an American-made MK-7 detonator was responsible for the crash and it was highly probable that the bomb was installed in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong authorities offered HK$100,000 for information leading to the arrest of those responsible. They questioned 71 people connected with the servicing of the Air India flight. When police began to focus on Chow Tse-ming, a janitor for Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Co., he stowed away to Taiwan on a CIA-owned Civil Air Transport aircraft.

The Hong Kong police concluded that the Kuomintang had recruited Chow to plant the bomb to kill Zhou Enlai. Apparently, he had bragged to friends about his role in the bombing, and had also spent large amounts of money before he left Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Police tried to extradite Chow, but Taiwan refused and denied that Chow was a KMT agent.

Steve Tsang collected evidence from British, Taiwanese, American and Hong Kong archives that points directly to KMT agents operating in Hong Kong as the perpetrators of the aircraft bombing. According to him, the KMT had a special-operations group stationed in Hong Kong responsible for assassination and sabotage. Designated the Hong Kong Group under Major-General Kong Hoi-ping, it operated a network of 90 agents. In March 1955, the group recruited Chow for the assassination because his job at the airport gave him easy access to the Air India plane, and offered him HK$600,000 and refuge in Taiwan, if necessary.

A Chinese document declassified in 2005 also indicates that the KMT secret service was responsible for the bombing.

[edit] CIA involvement

In addition to the KMT, there were rumours of CIA involvement in this incident as well. Aside from the fact that Chow escaped to Taiwan aboard a CIA-owned aircraft, there was no evidence that the CIA was involved until a decade later, when several Americans claimed they were involved.

Zhou Enlai was an influential figure in Communist China and the United States saw him as an obstacle in the Cold War. At the time, the West viewed the Bandung Conference as a gathering of communists and pro-communists that would boost the expansion of communism in Asia. The CIA believed that China planned to use the conference to boost its image as a world power. Although the CIA sent several agents posing as journalists to cover the conference, evidence suggests that some CIA officers might have taken further action.

In 1966, a U.S. Senate committee investigating CIA operations heard testimony that gave murky details of a CIA plot to assassinate an "East Asian leader" attending a 1955 Asian conference. That leader's identity would remain unknown until 1977, when William Corson, a retired U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in Asia, published Armies of Ignorance identifying that leader as Zhou Enlai.

On October 24, 1967, a CIA agent John Discoe Smith defected to the Soviet Union. There, Smith accounted many of his operations in his memoirs, entitled I Was an Agent of the CIA, including his delivery of a mysterious bag to a KMT agent. He says that in 1955, Jack Curran, a CIA officer attached to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, asked him to deliver a bag to a Wang Feng at the Maidens Hotel in the Indian capital. Smith claimed that the bag contained the bomb used to sabotage Kashmir Princess.

[edit] Commemorations

The captain of the plane, D.K. Jatar, who also perished in the crash, later became the first civilian to be posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra Award for "most conspicuous bravery, daring and self-sacrifice".

In 2005, the Xinhua News Agency hosted a symposium to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the crash in which three Xinhua journalists were among the victims.

[edit] References

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