
The Department of State suggested that the Soviets knew the plane was an unarmed civilian passenger aircraft. The United States government reacted with horror to the disaster. In its first public statement concerning the September 1983 incident, the Soviet government merely noted that an unidentified aircraft had been shot down flying over Russian territory. In 1978, the Soviets forced a passenger jet down over Murmansk two passengers were killed during the emergency landing. This was not the first time a South Korean flight had run into trouble over Russia. KAL 007 was hit and plummeted into the Sea of Japan. Failing to receive a response, one of the fighters fired a heat-seeking missile. According to tapes of the conversations between the fighter pilots and Soviet ground control, the fighters quickly located the KAL flight and tried to make contact with the passenger jet. The Soviets sent two fighters to intercept the plane. In just a short time, the plane flew into Russian airspace and crossed over the Kamchatka Peninsula, where some top-secret Soviet military installations were known to be located. As it approached its final destination, the plane began to veer far off its normal course. On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines (KAL) flight 007 was on the last leg of a flight from New York City to Seoul, with a stopover in Anchorage, Alaska. The incident dramatically increased tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. Soviet jet fighters intercept a Korean Airlines passenger flight in Russian airspace and shoot the plane down, killing 269 passengers and crew-members.
