Al-qaeda history in Korea

I don't know why, but I just suddendly decided to do a search on the "Bojinka plan". I heard about this plan some years back but couldn't derive any details of this plan from the internet.

Back then I wanted to know if the plan involved any Korean airlines or airlines departing from Korea. Now due to my renewed interest I've got my answer.

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:wHQY7DGlH3MJ:www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-03-16-ksm-planning_N.htm+seoul+al-qaeda&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=52

MANILA (AP) — Two top al-Qaeda operatives smuggled explosive ingredients onto flights from Manila and Hong Kong in 1994 as part of a test run for a failed plot to blow up 12 U.S.-bound airliners, according to a confidential document obtained by The Associated Press.
Captured terror suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's key role in the al-Qaeda plot to simultaneously bomb the commercial planes flying out of Asia — in a 1995 plan called "Project Bojinka" — was one of several admissions that he made, the U.S. Defense Department said.

Defense Department officials released a transcript of Mohammed's confessions, detailing his claims of roles in 31 terror plots worldwide, during a hearing at Guantanamo Bay prison.

"I was responsible for the planning and surveying needed to execute the Bojinka operation, which was designed to down 12 American airplanes full of passengers," the transcript quoted Mohammed as saying.

Mohammed said he personally monitored "a round-trip, Manila-to-Seoul, Pan-Am flight."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oplan_Bojinka

The next plan would have involved at least five Al-Qaeda operatives, including Yousef, Khan, Shah and two more unknown operatives. Starting on January 21, 1995 and ending on January 22, 1995, they would set the bombs on 11 United States-bound airliners that had stopovers all around East Asia and Southeast Asia. All of the flights had two legs. The bombs would be planted inside life jackets under seats on the first leg, when each bomber would disembark. He would then board one or two more flights and repeat. After all of the bombers planted bombs on all of the flights, each man would then catch flights to Lahore, Pakistan. The men never needed U.S. visas, as they only would have stayed on the planes on their first legs in Asia.

United States airlines had been chosen instead of Asian airlines so as to maximize the shock toward Americans. The flights targeted were listed under operatives with codenames: "Zyed", "Majbos", "Markoa", "Mirqas" and "Obaid". Obaid, who was really Abdul Hakim Murad, was to hit United flight 80, and then he was to go back to Singapore under another United flight which he would bomb.[3][5][7]

Zyed, probably Ramzi Yousef, was to hit Northwest Flight 30, a United Flight going from Taipei to Honolulu, and a United Flight going from Bangkok to Taipei to San Francisco[3][8]

The bombs would have been timed before the operatives stepped off the planes. The aircraft would have blown up over the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea almost simultaneously. If this plan worked, several thousand would have perished, and air travel would have been shut down worldwide for days, if not weeks. The U.S. government estimated the prospective death toll to be about 4,000 if the plot had been executed.

[edit] Targeted flights
Information still not complete - need OAG of 1995[3][10][8]
United Airlines Flight 80: Singapore - Hong Kong, which turned to United Airlines Flight 806: Hong Kong - San Francisco
Northwest Airlines Flight 30: Manila - Seoul - Los Angeles
Delta Air Lines Flight 59: Portland, OR - Seoul - Taipei - Bangkok (Bomber would board in Seoul and disembark at Taipei, bomb would explode on the way to Thailand)
Northwest Airlines Flight 6: Manila - Tokyo - Honolulu
United Airlines Flight 807: San Francisco - Seoul - Manila, which would turn around and fly another flight back Manila - Seoul - San Francisco (The bomber would board at Seoul and disembark at Manila, the bomb would activate after departure from Manila)
A United Airlines Flight: Los Angeles - Hong Kong - Singapore, would then go on Singapore - Hong Kong - Los Angeles (The bomb would explode after takeoff from Singapore on the way to Hong Kong)
A United Airlines Flight: Taipei - Tokyo - San Francisco
A United Airlines Flight: Seoul - Taipei, would then fly Taipei-Honolulu (The bomber would board at Seoul and get off at Taipei, the bomb would explode on the way to Honolulu)
A United Airlines Flight: San Francisco - Taipei - Bangkok, the flight would then turn around and go back to Taipei and San Francisco (The bomb was set to explode after takeoff from Bangkok)
A Northwest Airlines Flight: Portland - Tokyo - Hong Kong, would turn around and go back to Tokyo and Portland
A United Airlines Flight: Los Angeles - Tokyo - Hong Kong, the flight was set to go back to Tokyo and Los Angeles
A Northwest Airlines Flight: New York - Tokyo - Hong Kong, the flight was set to go back to Tokyo and New York.

First Korean astronaut to sing in space

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080407/od_afp/russiaskoreaspaceiss_080407074008

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AFP) - South Korea's first astronaut said Monday on the eve of her launch to the International Space Station (ISS) that she will celebrate arrival in space by singing for her fellow crew.



"We will have food on April 12 on the Day of Cosmonauts and I will sing but it's a secret what is the song," Yi So-Yeon, 29, said at a press conference at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she is set to blast off on Tuesday.

Yi, who has listed singing as one of her hobbies, said her first reaction on reaching the ISS would be to cry out: "Wow!"

She also told reporters that she hoped people in North Korea would share in the "triumph" of her mission, which starts Tuesday when she blasts up into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

A South Korean space official said that Yi's 12-day mission would cost South Korea around 20 million dollars (12.8 million euros) and that he hoped the flight would help further his country's manned space flight ambitions.

An official committee headed by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, gave official approval Monday for the mission by Yi and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.

The three astronauts spoke to the press from behind a glass screen at the Hotel Cosmonaut in Baikonur as they are being held in quarantine for fear of being contaminated ahead of their space flight.

Russians celebrate Cosmonaut Day on April 12, the day Soviet hero Yury Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961. Yi, Volkov and Kononenko will be blasting off from the same launch pad as Gagarin.

The Baikonur cosmodrome was built on the arid plains of Kazakhstan in Soviet times and Russia has continued to use the site under a rental deal since Kazakhstan became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

First Korean astronaut to sing in space

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080407/od_afp/russiaskoreaspaceiss_080407074008

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AFP) - South Korea's first astronaut said Monday on the eve of her launch to the International Space Station (ISS) that she will celebrate arrival in space by singing for her fellow crew.



"We will have food on April 12 on the Day of Cosmonauts and I will sing but it's a secret what is the song," Yi So-Yeon, 29, said at a press conference at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she is set to blast off on Tuesday.

Yi, who has listed singing as one of her hobbies, said her first reaction on reaching the ISS would be to cry out: "Wow!"

She also told reporters that she hoped people in North Korea would share in the "triumph" of her mission, which starts Tuesday when she blasts up into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

A South Korean space official said that Yi's 12-day mission would cost South Korea around 20 million dollars (12.8 million euros) and that he hoped the flight would help further his country's manned space flight ambitions.

An official committee headed by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, gave official approval Monday for the mission by Yi and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.

The three astronauts spoke to the press from behind a glass screen at the Hotel Cosmonaut in Baikonur as they are being held in quarantine for fear of being contaminated ahead of their space flight.

Russians celebrate Cosmonaut Day on April 12, the day Soviet hero Yury Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961. Yi, Volkov and Kononenko will be blasting off from the same launch pad as Gagarin.

The Baikonur cosmodrome was built on the arid plains of Kazakhstan in Soviet times and Russia has continued to use the site under a rental deal since Kazakhstan became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Military surveillance plane crashes

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2888394

A mid-air explosion sent a decades-old Korean Air Force RF-4C reconnaissance plane crashing amid thick smoke into a mountain yesterday morning in Pyeongchang, Gangwon, a Defense Ministry official said.
Two pilots on board for a military drill, a 34-year-old captain and a 26-year-old first lieutenant, ejected before the crash and received minor injuries, according to the official, who declined to be named.
The Air Force is investigating the cause and suspects an engine defect, the official said. That model of aircraft, made by the American firm McDonnell-Douglas, has not crashed in Korea since 1995.
The 34-year-old captain, only identified by his surname Ryu, was rescued dangling from a tree. The 26-year-old first lieutenant, Yu, received a minor injury on his face. Both were sent to an area military hospital.
After crashing, the plane broke into pieces which scattered around the mountain.
The plane took off from an Air Force base in Suwon, Gyeonggi, at 9:15 yesterday morning as part of military interceptor training.
The RF-4C, 18 meters (59 feet) in height and 11 meters wide, is a long-range plane capable of flying reconnaissance missions in all types of weather and at night. The plane, built in 1964, was brought in from the United States in 1990. That’s when Korea’s Air Force started using the planes, also used here by the U.S. military.
The aircraft can carry a variety of cameras in three different stations on its nose section and also take photos at both high and low altitudes, day or night. They are usually used for patrolling the border between the two Koreas.


By Kim Min-seok JoongAng Ilbo [hawon@joongang.co.kr]

Old american news on Kwangju massacre

Why can’t Korea learn from past disasters?

Not really a military article. But it sums up my general feelings about Korean's inability to realize the importance of military despite one military disaster after another.


http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2887364

Field hockey star Kim Sun-deok left Korea for good following a devastating fire in June 1999.
The fire, known in Korea as the Hwasung Sealand Tragedy, killed 19 children aged 5 to 7, including Do-hyun, Kim’s eldest son.
The cause of the blaze was attributed to an unattended mosquito coil at a summer camp in Hwasung, on the outskirts of Seoul.
After the accident, Kim turned in her medals. She was a silver medalist with the national women’s field hockey team at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and a two-time gold medalist at the Asian Games in 1988 and 1990.
She did it because the Korean government’s response to the worst fire disaster in living memory had been inadequate, she said.
Her family moved to New Zealand in 2002 and opened a Chinese restaurant called Taehwaru in the suburbs of Oakland, about 500 kilometers south of Auckland.
“If I had stayed in Korea, I would never have forgotten what happened,” said the former Olympian, 42, in an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo. “In Korea, you wake up and there is a new accident every morning.”
Experts say that companies and local authorities responsible for preventing accidents rarely learn from their mistakes and hardly ever publish comprehensive reports on the causes of accidents.
Reports that do get published tend to be full of holes, poorly structured, lacking vital information and leaving too many questions unanswered, they say.
Reports made available on the 20 major disasters that have occurred in Korea since 1993 lack the names of the investigators, while one report was released seven years after the accident being investigated took place.
Twelve out of 20 major accidents that have occurred in Korea since 1993 have not had official reports released to the public.
Only two reports ― on the collapse of Seongsu Bridge in 1994 and the Sampoong Department Store in 1995 ― included standard data such as the investigators’ names, frames of reference and expert comments. Even so, many experts said the contents still didn’t meet the standards of a professional case report.
Both cases registered their reports on the official Web site of the National Archives of Korea and were open to public at the National Assembly’s Library. But the Prosecutor’s Office, which formulated the two reports, still classified the document as secret.
The reports on Sampoong and the Sealand fire were also made available to the public at the National Archives of Korea and the National Assembly’s Library via electronic files.
In other cases where death tolls reached triple digits, no official reports were ever released.
Such cases include the gas explosion in the Daegu subway in 1995 that killed 101 and injured 202, the fire at Naksan Temple in 2005 that melted the temple’s treasures, including its great bell, and the fire at Suwon Fortress in 2006.

“The fire at a warehouse in Icheon that killed 40 workers in January has a lot of similarities to the fire at Sealand and a warehouse in Busan,” says Kim Ju-hwan, a firefighter in Seoul with 30 years’ experience on the job. “That shows how we have failed to learn from previous disasters.”
For a short while, Korea seemed to pay attention to the serious need for disaster prevention methods. Safety management measures poured in from the legal sector in Korea in 1993 following an Asiana Airlines crash, the sinking of a ferry in the Yellow Sea and a train derailment at Gupo train station in Busan that year.
The National Emergency Management Agency was set up to protect people from recurrence of disasters, including fires, gas explosions and typhoons. But accidents still continued to take place, often triggered by the same safety failures.
“So many major accidents have taken place in Korea, but we have not released proper official reports,” says Hong Won-hwa, a professor of architecture at Kyungpook National University.
In other instances, the sources of the reports were unclear or were not disclosed to the public.?
A gas explosion in Ahyeon-dong, Seoul, in 1994 left 12 dead and 49 injured. But the Korea Gas Corporation declined to release its report, explaining that it was made strictly “for the company’s account,” and could not be revealed publicly because “the person who is responsible for the explosion still works in the company.”
Lee In-sik, the director of the Science Culture Research Institute, says a report for insiders only is not much use.
“A database for all [reports] chronicling accidents is open to the public in Japan. The archives even include incidents that occurred in Korea, like the fire in the Daegu subway,” he says.
Hong, the professor at Kyungpook, was so frustrated by the government’s failure to produce an official report on the Daegu subway fire that he produced his own report at his own expense.
Hong is a member of his university’s fire disaster prevention institute. He waited for the government to step forward and offer to work on the report, but it didn’t, he says.
Shortly after the accident, he gathered a team of 16 students from his university’s master’s and Ph.D programs and started to investigate. He used statements from survivors and published his report in February 2004.
“The government was busy just getting the facts straight,” Hong says, adding that the management of the accident site at Daegu created further problems.
The day after the accident, the city government ordered a clean-up when it heard Kim Dae-jung, who was president at that time, would visit the site. Daegu city government began working on their official report after Hong’s paper was published, but the quality of the reports, many experts noted, was poor.
Hong’s report poignantly illustrates the status of safety regulations in Korea, which the press often dubs the “Republic of Disasters.”
The day after the subway fire in Daegu, Hong visited Joongangno Station, where the accident took place, and asked officials if he could investigate the area in his capacity as a state-run university’s fire expert. He was prevented from entering the site.
Yet on the same day, the Daegu city government allowed a team from Japan’s National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster to investigate the subway site for three days.
Hong eventually “imported” supporting documents for his paper from the Japanese experts.
“It made no sense that local fire experts were denied access but foreign experts were allowed to investigate,” Hong says. “When an accident takes place, the government should promptly commission an investigative team to produce a report.”

Japan currently keeps a database of “failed information,” (http://shippai.jst.go.jp), a Web site of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, which organizes information on science and technology accidents and failures in terms of cause, action and results.
The database is telling evidence of the importance of “manuals,” to help avert similar accidents in the future.
Meanwhile, Kim’s family is slowly recovering from the trauma of losing Do-hyun.
Kim’s husband, who suffered from a breakdown, has slowly recovered. Tae-hyun, Do-hyun’s younger brother, now 13, underwent art therapy to deal with his grief and his parents’ anger. During the first few sessions with the therapist, he painted an entire canvas black. Now, his paintings include colors and he dreams of becoming a movie director.
In 2002, the couple had another son, Si-hyun.
But bitter memories remain. Kim has kept all her dead son’s clothes and she gets in touch every June with other families who lost children in the Sealand fire.
“We never learn from the past,” Kim says. “It breaks my heart to see that soldiers, one of whom was a father of a young baby, died needlessly in a helicopter crash.” The reference is to a military accident last month.
“Koreans have grown numb to accidents,” she says.

Republic of Korea Special Warfare Command and Female Special Forces tribute

A tribute video to Korean Special Forces. Korean Army Special Forces, Marine Force Recon, Navy SEALS/UDT, and Air Force CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue).




The airman in the red beret is a CSAR trooper.


The following are women in South Korean special forces. As far as I know, the only SF units that allow women in are Army SF only.






She's no Special Forces, but she's pretty so I'm going to save a spot for her. She's wearing a red beret just like the CSAR, but she's not affiliated with them as there are multiple units in Korea that wear red berets. She belongs to the Military Police unit.




There are at least three units in Korea that wear red berets.

Air Force CSAR
Military Police
Police SWAT teams stationed in Seoul