The Mystery of Flight 858

The feeble-looking man and his daughter sat quietly on a bench outside the airport immigration office in Bahrain. Despite their apparent calm, they were the center of an international storm. Two days earlier they had disembarked in Abu Dhabi from Korean Air Lines Flight 858, en route from Baghdad to Seoul. Hours later the plane disappeared over the Andaman Sea, shortly before a scheduled stopover in Thailand. Officials in Seoul openly speculated that the Boeing 707, carrying 95 passengers and a crew of 20, might have been destroyed by a bomb planted by North Korean agents. South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan said the North was intensifying "provocative moves to obstruct the upcoming < presidential election and the Olympics."

The couple, who identified themselves as Japanese Tourist Shinichi Hachiya and his daughter Mayumi, were about to leave Bahrain for Rome when immigration officials, accompanied by a Japanese diplomat, stopped them. A South Korean request for Tokyo to check travel documents had revealed that the woman held a fake passport. She would have to return to Japan. Asked if he wanted to proceed to Rome, her companion said, "It is useless to travel alone." As a guard watched over them in the Bahrain airport, the woman took out a pack of Marlboros. Removing a glass capsule, the couple consumed an unknown substance and slumped forward. Rushed to a hospital, the man was pronounced dead. The woman survived but refused to talk.

Meanwhile, reporters discovered another Shinichi Hachiya living in Tokyo. He claims that a friend of Korean extraction had helped him apply for his passport four years ago and had kept it for a while, long enough to forge a copy. While police linked the friend to North Korean sympathizers living in Japan, his fingerprints do not match those of the fake Shinichi. As the mystery deepens, Seoul is already threatening to withdraw an offer to allow Pyongyang to stage some Olympic events.