Damage May Indicate Jet Was Destroyed By Bomb Landing Gear Could Offer Best Evidence Of Explosives Near Front Cargo Hold

The front landing gear of the Boeing 747 that crashed off the coast here on July 17 shows such heavy damage that some investigators are convinced it is the strongest evidence yet that the plane was destroyed by a bomb, federal investigators said on Tuesday night.

The investigators believe the landing gear was blown off the plane by a bomb blast. But several senior law enforcement officials said on Tuesday night the finding still fell short of the definitive evidence that they said they needed before they could declare the crash the result of a criminal act.

The landing gear would have been retracted into its housing inside the fuselage long before the plane exploded, and the hydraulic mechanism that retracts it was found to have “serious concussive damage,” a federal investigator said. “By the way it had been smashed, the bomb experts thought it had been very close to the source of the explosion.”

The front cargo hold carrying passengers’ baggage was just behind the landing gear. The first-class seating area was above. Investigators said on Tuesday evening that they believe a bomb might have been in a passenger’s bag - or perhaps in a food cart or a bathroom in the cabin above.

For the last several days, law enforcement officials investigating the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 have been saying privately they believed that the plane was destroyed by a bomb, but they have been waiting to find a piece of clear physical evidence to support their theory.

The latest discovery caused a stir among the divers, Navy and Coast Guard technicians and federal agents who recovered the landing gear on Saturday.

Samples of apparent residue found on the landing gear have been sent to the FBI lab in Washington to find if they hold chemical traces of an explosive. Thus far, they have not found such conclusive chemical evidence.

Investigators also said on Tuesday that a cargo door, presumably the front one, had been found significantly closer to Kennedy International Airport than almost all of the other parts located so far, tending to support the theory that a bomb blew up in the forward cargo hold, blowing off the door.

Divers are continuing to labor in debris fields that two of them on Tuesday described as being like underwater junkyards.

The searchers have now recovered 171 bodies, and 165 have been positively identified. Of those, 157 have been returned to next of kin.