January 26th, 1972, JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 lands for it’s first stopover at the Copenhagen Airport at 2:30 p.m. JAT Flight 367 was scheduled to fly from Stockholm, Sweden to Belgrade, Serbia with two stopovers, one in Copenhagen, Denmark the other in Zagreb, Croatia. Unfortunately JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 would never make it to it’s second stopover.
JAT Flight 367 would take off from Copenhagen at 3:15 p.m., at 4:01 p.m. an explosion erupted in the baggage compartment breaking the plane into three parts over the Czechoslovak village Srbská Kamenice.
Bruno Honke, once World War II medic, came upon the crash site, finding the one surviving passenger, flight attendant Vesna Vulović. She fell from 10,160 meters, 33,330 feet, and survived. With Honke’s medical knowledge he managed to keep her alive till the rescuers arrived and got her to a hospital. There she was in a coma for 27 days, and temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. However she awoke and after some medical intervention was eventually able to walk again. The only member of the 28 passengers to survive the bombing.
Though suffering amnesia to nearly a month after the explosion she can remember details up to almost an hour before. "As it was late, we were in the terminal and saw it park," Vulović said. "I saw all the passengers and crew deplane. One man seemed terribly annoyed. It was not only me that noticed him either. Other crew members saw him, as did the station manager in Copenhagen. I think it was the man who put the bomb in the baggage. I think he had checked in a bag in Stockholm, got off in Copenhagen and never re-boarded the flight."
The tragedy is attributed to Croatian Nationalists, a terrorists group. Between 1962 and 1982 this terrorist group carried out around 128 terrorist attacks on Yugoslavian and military targets. The same day of the the plane crash a bomb exploded on a train travelling from Vienna, Austria and Zagreb, Croatia. The following day a man, who described himself as a Croatian nationalist, called a newspaper in Sweden, Kvällsposten, claiming responsibility of the bombing of Flight 367. Sadly no person was arrested for this tragedy.
There have of course been conspiracy theories around this incident, the biggest being a coverup by the Czech government for accidently shooting down the civilian plane mistaking it for an enemy plane attempting a forced landing. Though the evidence of this is circumstantial and has been easily disproven.
