May 1, 1993: Iran Trains Suicide Pilots at Secret Terror School, Expert Says

Yossef Bodansky, the director of the Republican Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US Congress, writes that Iran is training terrorists in aviation hijacking at a secret facility in Wakilabad, near the city of Mashad. The training includes suicide missions. “According to a former trainee in Wakilabad, one of the exercises included having an Islamic jihad detachment seize (or hijack) a transport aircraft. Then, trained air crews from among the terrorists would crash the airliner into a selected objective.” [Bodansky, 1993, pp. 15] After the 9/11 attacks, Bodansky will suspect Iranian culpability. He will say: “We’ve known since the mid-eighties, for example, that Iran was training people to fly as kamikazes on commercial planes, as bombs, into civilian targets.… The bottom line is that the attack in New York and Washington was carefully prepared and studied. The people who flew into the World Trade Center were highly trained professionals with experience in flying large commercial jets. Flying large aircraft at low altitudes in an urban sky is not a simple thing.” [New Yorker, 9/24/2001] Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), the chair of a Congressional task force on terrorism and unconventional warfare, will make the same charge. [Associated Press, 9/20/2001]