Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

692 • UTA FLIGHT 772 BOMBINGthe more controversial positions to address civil liberties concerns.The 2006 amendment of Title II, Section 206, governing roving wiretapsand the amendments of Section 215 giving investigators accessto business records allowed for greater judicial oversight and review,while the delay in notification permitted under Section 213, “sneakand peek” searches, should not exceed 30 days and removed mentionof the objectionable gag order.The 2001 act also addressed several other issues, including moneylaundering, border security, compensation for the victims of terrorism,and other miscellaneous matters that legislators believed tohave been inadequately covered by previous statutory law.UTA FLIGHT 772 BOMBING. On 19 September 1989 at 1:59 p.m.,Flight 772, a DC-10 of the now-defunct French air carrier Union desTransports Aériens (UTA), exploded in midflight over Niger, killingall 170 people aboard. The flight originated in Brazzaville, Congo,destined for Paris with a stop at N’Djamena airport in Chad. The DC-10 exploded on the Chad-to-France portion of the flight, killing allaboard, most of whom were French citizens but also seven U.S. citizensand 49 Congolese. One of the American passengers was BonniePugh, the wife of Robert Pugh, the U.S. ambassador to Chad.On 7 May 1997 French antiterrorism investigators obtained indictmentsagainst six Libyans, one of them being Abdallah Senoussi,who was the second-ranking Libyan security official at the timeof the bombing and who is also a brother-in-law of Libyan leaderMuammar Qaddafi. Senoussi was believed to have ordered thebombing in retaliation for France’s providing troops to Chad, enablingit to resist a Libyan invasion. Libyan agents had paid a Congolesecitizen to check onto Flight UTA-772 from Brazzaville and gavehim a Samsonite suitcase with three pounds of pentrite explosive anda detonator. The Congolese man, who had intended to disembark inN’Djamena but was prevented from doing so, was killed with the restof the passengers when the plane exploded above Niger.Based on forensic evidence recovered by French antiterrorism investigatorsfrom the UTA Flight 772 wreckage spread over hundredsof square miles of desert, and based also on the findings of JudgeJean-Louis Bruguière, who was permitted by Qaddafi to interrogatemembers of the Libyan intelligence service in July 1996, a Frenchantiterrorism court in 1999 tried and convicted in absentia Senoussi