Air India plane crashes in botched assassination bid
Investigations after the crash revealed it was an assassination attempt by the Kuomintang
NEW DELHI: A chartered Air India International flight crashed in the sea north of Sarawak in the South China Sea on April 11, 1955, claiming the lives of 11 passengers bound for the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in Jakarta. Four members of the crew also died. Three members of the crew survived the accident.
The Lockheed Constellation aircraft, called Kashmir Princess, was expected to carry Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to the conference, and subsequent investigations, including by India’s Intelligence Bureau (RN Kao, then with IB, headed it) revealed that it was a botched assassination attempt by the Kuomintang.
It has never been clear why Zhou missed the flight, although subsequent reports have suggested that he did so after being informed of the plot.
Soon after the crash, Jakarta Radio said the Constellation was not carrying Zhou but an advance guard of eight minor Chinese officials, two Polish journalists and a north Vietnamese. Kashmir Princess was also reported to be carrying a crew of seven apart from the 11 passengers. The aircraft left Bombay on Sunday evening on its scheduled passenger service to Hong Kong. It was then chartered to fly to Jakarta by the Chinese government.
The aircraft left Hong Kong on the afternoon of Monday, April 11. It sent out three SOS signals a while later, giving its position as 108 miles north of Kuchine, Sarawak, according to reports. Eight minutes before the first SOS, the plane signalled its position and gave no indication that it was in trouble. Its last position was in the vicinity of the Great Natuna Islands in the South China Sea.
Search and rescue operations were launched from India, Hong Kong and Indonesia.
An RAF Sunderland flying boat took off from Singapore and was making a radar search for survivors near the Great Natuna Islands, in Indonesia.
All ships in the area were told by radio to keep a look out. They subsequently rescued three of the crew. According to diplomatic records declassified by Beijing in April 2004, a time bomb was planted in the wheel bay of the Kashmir Princess.
Investigations revealed that the bomb had been planted in the aircraft by a janitor at Hong Kong airport who was an agent of Kuomintang and who, media reports claimed, escaped to Taiwan. When it went off, it set off a fire, the engines and equipment failed, and the pilot had no option but to try and crash the aircraft into the sea.
“Air India’s manager was probably told of a plan to sabotage in general terms,” Steve Tsang of SOAS, University of London, wrote for the China Quarterly in 1994.
About the crash, Tsang, a political scientist specializing in Chinese politics, wrote, “After an uneventful five hours, the time bomb exploded. It started a fire which spread quickly and put the hydraulic system to the flaps and undercarriage out of action. The crew carried out emergency sea landing procedures and the plane crashed into the sea 108 miles north of Kuching, Sarawak.”
An Air India statement said the aircraft was piloted by Captain DK Jatar. Both he and the stewardess Gloria Eva Berry, were posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra Award , India’s highest peacetime military award. The three survivors, first officer MC Dixit, ground maintenance engineer Anant Karnik, and navigator JC Pathak were also given the award. Interestingly, this was the first instance where the award was given to civilians.