I raced home from school late one hot afternoon to find my aged mother strangely in tears, sadly listening to our faded transistor radio permanently perched on the matching bright blue formica dining table that shimmered with flecks of gold and silver, like an early, starry night sky. As darkness fell and details trickled in, I desperately tried to visualise the deadly crash of Cubana Flight 455, mere hours before.
But it took the sombre 11 black and white photographs in the next day’s newspaper, especially of Sabrina Harripaul, like me, nine years old and wearing two long black plaits, to forever stamp the atrocity of the Caribbean’s first major terror attack into my growing consciousness.
Euphemistically and erroneously termed the Cubana Air Disaster, it is the region’s