BANGKOK, Thailand — Western security officials on Monday surveyed the wreckage of an Austrian airliner that crashed in western Thailand and said they are nearly certain that the plane was downed by a bomb explosion.
“All the available evidence points to a bomb,” one Western official said. “The pieces of the plane wreckage were literally tiny and spread out over a wide area.”
“It was far, far worse than Lockerbie (in the way the wreckage was scattered),” said a Western airline official familiar with the investigation into the crash of a Pan American Boeing 747 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. The Pan Am plane, which carried 270 passengers and crew, was later found to have been downed by a bomb initially placed aboard a connecting flight in Frankfurt, Germany, apparently by terrorists from the Middle East.
Franz Karner, Hong Kong sales manager for Lauda Air, the airline that owned the Boeing 767-300 jet, told a news conference in the British colony Monday that the plane appeared to have been destroyed by an explosion and subsequent fireball on board. Asked if he thought it was a bomb, he replied, “It looks like it.”
