Terror bid on plane turns out to be ‘atom’ bomb of spite

Thiruvananthapuram: The plane bomb scare that set off a country-wide terror alert last week has turned out to be the handiwork of an airport worker out to spite an airline official, police sources said.
Rajasekharan Nair, 49, a former CISF constable and now a cleaning supervisor with a ground-handling agency, apparently wanted to settle old scores with the duty manager of Kingfisher Airlines.
So he stole a mix of cracker ingredients stored for a firework display at a temple near his home on the outskirts of this city, the sources said. The mix of potassium chlorate, sulphur and aluminium powder was meant to be converted into crude bombs, nicknamed “atom” and used extensively in temple festivals for their high decibel levels.
Nair was either not frisked by the CISF, which he left in 2003, or somehow managed to dodge security as he sneaked into a Kingfisher flight from Bangalore soon after it landed here on March 21.
The suspect has allegedly confessed to police that he hid the “atom” in the aircraft’s cargo hold. Half an hour later, he slid it across the plane’s floor and then informed the CISF commandant about his “find”.
The discovery, coinciding with a major terrorist hunt in Kerala, led to a furore and parallel probes by Kerala and Karnataka police, the CISF director-general, Airports Authority of India and the Union home ministry.
One feature of the mystery stood out: the bomb was wrapped unusually in a Kerala school board question paper and a Malayalam newspaper. The wrappers led the police to Nair.
29/03/10 John Mary/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports Mar 2010, Kingfisher Mar 2010, Safety Mar 2010