Niggling worries about an American-backed assassination plot, looming local economic problems, and the sudden bombing of the country’s Consulate in Trinidad, plagued Guyana’s troubled leader, at the time doomed Cubana Airliner Flight 455 went down in 1976, American diplomatic cables reveal.
“Grown men were in this office this morning – crying – demanding that I do something about the deaths of their children” an upset Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, declared in one memorable conversation with a top United States (US) Embassy official. Within hours of the terrorist twin assault of the plane and its fiery end in the Caribbean Sea off Barbados’ beautiful west coast, killing all 73 passengers, he was “visibly” and “emotionally shaken.”