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Thursday, October 5, 2006 |
LawrenceOfCyberia: "At 6:21pm on 4 October 1992, a Boeing 747 airliner of the Israeli airline El Al took off from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport for Tel Aviv, following a stopover en route from New York. The plane suffered catastrophic mechanical failure soon after takeoff, losing one right-side engine, which sheared off taking the second with it. The pilot attempted to loop back to make an emergency landing at Schiphol, but lost control short of the airfield. Flight 1862 crashed about 10 minutes after take-off into the Groeneveen and Kruitberg apartment buildings in Bijlmermeer, a working class suburb in south-eastern Amsterdam.
As for the 114 tons of cargo on flight 1862: El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to assure the public that the doomed flight carried nothing but 'perfume and gift articles'. El Al insisted that the plane carried 'a regular commercial load'. As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were 'no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide'.
Almost six years after the event, on 30 September 1998, editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad published the results of an extensive investigation they had carried out into the crash. They had obtained the freight documentation for the flight, and made public for the first time its real cargo. The manifest confirmed the plane was carrying 400 kilograms of depleted uranium as ballast, but also showed that it carried among its cargo about 10 tons of assorted chemicals. The chemicals included ten 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride: three of the four chemical precursors for the production of Sarin nerve gas."
12:19:38 PM 
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