Chow Tse-ming

Chow Tse-ming was a janitor for Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Co. Investigators believed him to be a Kuomintang secret agent responsible for planting the time bomb on the Air India aircraft "Kashmir Princess", which crashed into the Pacific Ocean after a midair explosion on April 11, 1955. The apparent target of the assassination was Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who had been scheduled to board the plane to attend the conference but had changed his travel plans at the last minute.

After the crash, the Hong Kong authorities offered HK$100,000 for information leading to the arrest of those responsible. They questioned 71 people connected with the servicing of the Air India flight. When police began to focus on Chow Tse-ming, he stowed away to Taiwan on a CIA-owned Civil Air Transport aircraft.

The Hong Kong police concluded that the Kuomintang had recruited Chow to plant the bomb to kill Zhou Enlai. Apparently, he had bragged to friends about his role in the bombing, and had also spent large amounts of money before he left Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Police tried to extradite Chow, but Taiwan refused and denied that Chow was a KMT agent.

Steve Tsang of Oxford University collected evidence from British, Taiwanese, American and Hong Kong archives that points directly to KMT agents operating in Hong Kong as the perpetrators of the aircraft bombing. According to him, the KMT had a special-operations group stationed in Hong Kong responsible for assassination and sabotage, which recruited Chow in March 1955, for the assassination because his job at the airport gave him easy access to the Air India plane, and offered him HK$600,000 and refuge in Taiwan, if necessary.

A Chinese document declassified in 2005 also indicates that the KMT secret service was responsible for the bombing.

ee also

* "Kashmir Princess"