An intelligence source was quoted in the UK newspaper “Independent in Arabic” saying how in 2018, Iran had sent half a ton of TATP explosives in diplomatic packages to a civilian airplane the Jpost reports. That civilian plane was headed to Paris and was supposed to be used to carry out a terrorist attack in the French capital.

According to the report, the civilian plane flew from Tehran to Geneva in June 2018, after an Iranian plot to carry out a terror attack during a gathering of Iran’s opposition. The same report notes that the attack was meant to be carried out by an Iranian intelligence agent who was employed at the Iranian embassy in Austria. However, the French intelligence foiled the attack following the arrest of a Belgian couple of Iranian origin who had the explosives in their vehicle while traveling to Paris.

The Iranian asset who was meant to carry out the attack went to Tehran on July 20, 2018. It was there that he received TATP explosives. On June 22, he transported those explosives in a civilian airplane from Tehran to Austria on flight OS872. The explosives were delivered in a diplomatic suitcase aboard Airbus A320. That airplane had 240 passengers in it. 

The source added that if that explosive material it entered into strong pockets of air, the airplane would have exploded in mid-air. 

The source implied that that was precisely what happened to the Russian plane, Metrojet Flight 9268, that exploded shortly after take-off from the Sharm el-Sheikh airport in Egypt in 2015. When that happened, all 244 passengers were killed by an explosive charge weighing only half a kilogram of TNT.