Free Republic

The April 1978 shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 902 by a Soviet Su-15 fighter plane—which killed two passengers but spared 107 others—distressed the Soviet air force, not because it had shot down a civilian airliner, but rather that it had gotten so far into Soviet airspace before being intercepted. Five years later, a second encounter between Su-15s and a Korean airliner would result in far heavier loss of life. On Aug. 30, 1983, KAL Flight 007 departed from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, bound for Seoul with 269 crew and passengers aboard. The 747 airliner made...

In the midst of public outcry over the decision by Scottish authorities to free Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, convicted in 1991 for his involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the anniversary of an older case of state-sponsored terrorism, the shooting down by KAL 007 by Soviet jet fighters in 1983, is almost forgotten by the media and public. When a bomb planted by Libyan terrorists tore Pan Am flight 103 from the sky on December 21, 1988, 270 people — 259 of them on the plane and 11 more on the ground — were killed....