- in 1994 Islamic terrorists hijackers planned to explode an airliner over Paris or crash it into the Eiffel tower. Fortunately French commandos killed the hijackers on the ground.
GIGN at Marseilles Airport, December 1994 (www.specialoperations.com referencing Twilight Warriors by Martin C. Arotegui, St. Martin's Press) International Security in the Early 21st Century (International Security Information Service Briefing Paper No. 76, January 2000, by Paul Rogers and personal sources from the FAA saying the information on plans to use the airliner as a bomb came from French authorities.
Additional information Seattle Times, June 23-July7, 2002 (segment 5 of series on Islamic terrorist Ahmed Ressam, The Terrorist Tracker (French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière)
That story indicates that the responsible organization had drawings of the Eiffel Tower exploding, and a related organization with ties to al Qaeda had contacts in North American.
That is, suicidal Islamic terrorists tried to use an airliner as a bomb
- exactly what was done to the WTC towers and the Pentagon.
In 1994 a terrorism expert tried to warn US authorities of the probability of an airplane attack on Washington DC (pointing to the 1994 hijacking of a French airliner and the 1994 crashing of a small airplane on White House grounds) but they insisted he not put that in a report. Early Warnings(ABCNews.com, February 18, 2002) -
In 1995 authorities in the Phillipines uncovered a plot to bomb eleven US airliners over the Pacific and simultaneously crash another plane into CIA headquarters in northern Virginia. One source claims they uncovered evidence of a plan to recruit hijackers to crash airplanes into government and commercial buildings in the US (CIA HQ, and commercial towers in San Francisco, Chicago and NY.) They had accomplished a test of their non-suicidal method in 1994 on a Phillipine Airlines flight to Japan (most of the 11 flights in the plot were of American Airlines and United Airlines). They had specific plans to crash a small airplane into CIA headquarters in Virginia as a suicide mission, and less well formed plans to use airliners against other buildings. Investigators made significant connections to bin laden, and one of the people arrested in the Phillipines was later convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. (According to www.sunspot.net of September 27, referring to the book Study of Revenge by Laurie MyIroie, www.cnn.com of September 22, 2001 by Maria Ressa in Manila, and www.cnn.com of September 18, 2001 by Maria Ressa.) and Agonized hindsight over earlier terror plot (Seattle Times January 06, 2001 which extensively quotes Phillipine policewoman Aida Fariscal who investigated an apartment containing evidence. - Probable origin Washington Post.) That is, known airlines as targets, simultaneous action, US government buildings as targets of airplanes used as bombs, and probability of exactly what happened in the US six years later.