French police have said explosives found
aboard a Royal Air Maroc plane were part of a
failed bomb plot and not just a provocation.
Customs officials using sniffer dogs found the
stick of explosives in between two passenger
seats after the Boeing 747 had landed in
eastern France on Wednesday night.
Initial theories
suggested the
explosives - found
without a detonator -
might have been
intended for
clandestine onward
delivery.
But investigators now
believe it was an
attempt at a bombing.
"This was done to
make a hole in the
plane," a judicial source told news agency
Associated Press.
Mystery
Police are still at a loss as to who secreted the
100-gram stick of explosive, wrapped in
aluminium, aboard the flight to Metz-Nancy
airport from Marrakesh.
Investigations are still continuing into the 160
tourists and crew on board have found no one
with any suspicious record.
Police from Strasbourg and French
anti-terrorist and intelligence services have
extended their search to include passengers on
previous flights that day on the same plane.
Two theories
An early hypothesis was that the explosives
could have been intended for delivery - placed
aboard the plane during an internal flight and
left there for transport during a subsequent
international flight.
But this theory now
appears less likely,
French sources said,
because the risk to
the courier was so
much greater than
that of using other
means of transport.
Investigators are now
tending towards the
more sinister theory
that a later passenger
planned to attach a
detonator to the
explosives while
aboard the plane's next scheduled flight back
to Morocco.
Parliamentary elections taking place in Morocco
on Friday could provide a motive for the plot.
'Shoe bomber's' choice
The explosive found was pentrite, a granular
powder which can be used alone or in
composition with other chemicals such as
Semtex.
Semtex was used in the 1988 Lockerbie
bombing which killed 270 people.
Pentrite is also the substance that was found
in the shoes of Richard Reid, a British man who
allegedly tried to blow up an airliner heading
from Paris to Miami with a bomb in his shoes.
beeb.