A chartered Air India International flight crashed within the sea north of Sarawak within the South China Sea on April 11, 1955, claiming the lives of 11 passengers sure for the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in Jakarta. Four members of the crew additionally died. Three members of the crew survived the accident,

The Lockheed Constellation plane, referred to as Kashmir Princess, was anticipated to hold Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to the convention, and subsequent investigations, together with by India’s Intelligence Bureau (R N Kao, then with IB, headed it) revealed that it was a botched assassination try by the Kuomintang.

It has by no means been clear why Zhou missed the flight, though subsequent reviews have instructed that he did so after being knowledgeable of the plot.

Soon after the crash, Jakarta Radio stated the Constellation was not carrying Zhou however an advance guard of eight minor Chinese officers, two Polish journalists and a north Vietnamese.

Kashmir Princess was additionally reported to be carrying a crew of seven aside from the 11 passengers. The plane left Bombay on Sunday night on its scheduled passenger service to Hong Kong. It was then chartered to fly to Jakarta by the Chinese authorities.

The plane left Hong Kong on the afternoon of Monday, April 11. It despatched out three SOS alerts some time later, giving its place as 108 miles north of Kuchine, Sarwak, in keeping with reviews. Eight minutes earlier than the primary SOS, the aircraft signalled its place and gave no indication that it was in hassle. Its final place was within the neighborhood of the Great Natuna Islands within the South China Sea.

Search and rescue operations had been launched from India, Hong Kong and Indonesia. An RAF Sunderland flying boat took off from Singapore and was making a radar seek for survivors close to the Great Natuna Islands, in Indonesia. All ships within the space had been instructed by radio to maintain a glance out. They subsequently rescued three of the crew.

According to diplomatic data declassified by Beijing in April 2004, a time bomb was planted within the wheel bay of the Kashmir Princess.

Investigations revealed that the bomb had been planted within the plane by a janitor at Hong Kong airport who was an agent of Kuomintang and who, media reviews claimed, escaped to Taiwan. When it went off, it set off a fireplace, the engines and gear failed, and the pilot had no possibility however to attempt to crash the plane into the ocean.

“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 assertion stated the plane was piloted by Captain D Okay Jatar. Both he and the stewardess Gloria Eva Berry, had been posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra Award , India’s highest peacetime army award. The three survivors, first officer M.C Dixit, floor upkeep engineer Anant Karnik, and navigator J.C. Pathak had been additionally given the award. Interestingly, this was the primary occasion the place the award was given to civilians.