The official cause of the crash remains what it has been since the Czechoslovak investigation: a bomb in the forward baggage compartment.
## The Cold War Context: Yugoslavia, Terrorism, and the Geography of the Route
Flight 367 did not exist in a political vacuum. It was a Yugoslav airline flight operating in Cold War Europe, and the specific vulnerabilities that made it a target were shaped by that context.
The Croatian émigré nationalist movement that Yugoslav investigators suspected was responsible for the bombing had been conducting operations against Yugoslav targets since the early 1960s. The perpetrators, or those suspected of involvement, operated from bases in Western Europe — particularly West Germany and Sweden, both countries with significant Croatian exile communities. The route that Flight 367 flew — from Stockholm through Copenhagen to Zagreb and Belgrade — passed through precisely the geography where these exile organizations were most active.
Yugoslavia’s political position made its airline a distinctive target. As a socialist country that was not part of the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia occupied a space that made it simultaneously an irritant to Croatian nationalist exiles (who wanted independence from the Yugoslav state) and a country that could not call on Soviet bloc security resources for protection. Its commercial aviation infrastructure — its flights, its airports, its transit passengers — was exposed in ways that a NATO-country airline or a Warsaw Pact airline might not have been.
The Croatian nationalist organizations responsible for attacks on Yugoslav targets in this period drew on the legacy of the Ustasha movement — the fascist Croatian regime that had collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War and had been responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and political opponents during its wartime existence. After Yugoslavia’s liberation in 1945, many Ustasha leaders and members fled to Western Europe and the Americas, where they formed exile organizations that remained hostile to the Yugoslav communist state.