MOSCOW: “Target destroyed” crackled the radio message of Soviet air force pilot Gennady Osipovitch on the morning of September 1, 1983, after two missiles fired from his Sukhoi-15TM fighter did their deadly work.

But the object blasted from the skies by Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Far East was no enemy spy plane but rather a Korean Airlines 747 jumbo jet with 269 people on board.

The doomed flight of KAL 007 twenty years ago was one of the most horrific incidents of the Cold War and has still not been explained in full.

There is no public knowledge of why the South Korean jetliner left its designated course on a two-hour foray through Soviet airspace. What is clear is that 269 people fell victim to the spymania that reigned in the confrontation between East and West.

After decades of hostility, 1983 was the last year spent on a knife edge before tensions began to wind down, yielding to the detente that came in 1985 with Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession as Communist Party chief.

The country was still in the grip of the gnarled line of old guard leaders, now the ailing Yury Andropov who inherited the levers of power from Leonid Brezhnev in 1982.

Soviet soldiers fought for the fourth year in Afghanistan. Poland lifted its state of martial law in 1983 but the situation there was tense even two and a half years after the Solidarity workers’ union was crushed by force.

In March, US President Ronald Reagan branded the Soviet Union the “evil empire”, and in October he sent US marines to topple the leftist government on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

In Germany, NATO forces deployed the first Pershing-2 missiles and cruise missiles despite protests by the burgeoning peace movement.

Amid the simmering events in the world arena, flight KAL 007 from New York was due to make a routine run to the South Korean capital Seoul. But after a stop-over in Anchorage, Alaska, the crew of Captain Chun Byung-in took a course that veered northwest from the intended route.

The jumbo passed Soviet military installations on the Kamchatka Peninsular, crossed the Sea of Okhotsk and then Sakhalin, also an area of military importance.

There was no indication from radio contacts with the crew that they had noticed any error.

Soviet air defence twice scrambled planes to investigate the appearance of the intruder.

No clear warning was issued before the attack apart from some bursts on the fighter’s machine guns that may not have been visible to the Korean crew.

Finally Major Osipovitch was ordered to destroy the aircraft, 90 seconds before KAL 007 would have crossed into Japanese airspace. Hit by the missiles, the plane spiralled down 11,000 metres and crashed into the sea.

Reagan denounced the act as “barbaric” and tens of thousands of people in South Korea took to the streets in protest.

The Soviet government was unrepentant, insisting the plane violating its airspace was unlit and evidently on a spying mission. Only years later did Osipovitch admit in an interview that the Boeing was fully lit.

In its final report in 1993, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) attributed the tragedy to a combination of factors. At the time in question a US RC-135 spy plane had also entered Soviet airspace, giving possible grounds for confusion.—dpa