She said that McCartney presented her with two awards: the certificate and a medal. The ceremony at the Guinness World Records Hall of Fame in 1985 was one of the genuinely joyful public moments in a post-crash life that had its share of difficulty.
The record she received in 1985 was contested in 2009 when two German and Czech journalists published claims that the aircraft had been shot down at a much lower altitude. Guinness, on being informed of these claims, said it was concerned it may have been misled. But after the Czech Civil Aviation Authority reviewed the evidence and rejected the shootdown hypothesis as media speculation, and after independent experts examined the flight recorder data, Guinness continued to list Vulović’s record. The record stands today.
## The Cause: What Investigators Found and What Was Never Fully Resolved
The official investigation into JAT Flight 367 was conducted by Czechoslovak aviation authorities, who had jurisdiction over the crash site. Their conclusion — that the aircraft was destroyed by an improvised explosive device concealed in carry-on luggage placed in the forward baggage compartment — is the established official finding.
The investigation identified the Copenhagen stopover as the most likely point at which the bomb was placed. Witnesses reported having noticed unusual behavior by a passenger at Copenhagen Airport on the day of the flight. The specific characteristics of the evidence at the crash site were consistent with an explosion originating in the front baggage compartment.
Yugoslav authorities, in their parallel investigation, developed suspicions about Croatian émigré nationalist organizations. The context for this suspicion was significant: Croatian nationalist exile groups had carried out numerous attacks against Yugoslav targets in the preceding decade. A Croatian nationalist group was believed to have been responsible for 128 terrorist attacks against Yugoslav targets between 1962 and 1982 — attacks that included bombings, assassinations, and a hijacking. The same day as the Flight 367 explosion, a bomb injured six people on a train traveling from Vienna to Zagreb. The pattern was consistent with an organized campaign.