What prompted you to unearth the events of the past? What drove you to research this incident? Where did you get the idea? It was a tragic incident... but what do you hope to achieve with this research?

These questions surrounded him for seven years, the duration of this book's preparation. They came not only from those who dialed their phones more than thirty-five years ago to ask the old Riyadh airport administration about the fate of their relatives on Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight 163... To this day, everyone still asks... What prompted you to revive the memory of this incident?

In the year 1400 AH, he was a child in the first grade. On Eid al-Fitr of that year, he returned from Medina, from the town of "Al-Qurain"... that quiet village where he picked the flowers of his childhood and spent the spring of his life among its alleys. On their rooftops, children slept soundly, counting the planes coming and going. His return to Riyadh coincided with a momentous event... a civilian plane burning in the sky and on the ground of the Saudi capital's airport.

Newspaper pages were filled with stories of children, the elderly, and women who were waiting for a glimmer of light inside the dark "tube" of the plane. The "famous" announcer apologized for not reading the news, and his "more famous" colleague was absent that evening... No one wanted to read the tragic news. Everyone was talking about stories and scenes that were not from their imagination. In Mecca, Jeddah, and Riyadh, some houses were emptied of their residents, and other homes lost some of their lights... All the news poured into the ear, heart, and eye of that little child, and the incident's impact remained in his heart and mind for thirty-eight years.

As the social media generation knocked on the doors of the third millennium, it was time for that child, who had grown up and perhaps grown old, to document the story of the final moments of more than three hundred people's deaths in a book whose final page would answer many questions, all boiling down to... What prompted you to research the "Tristar" incident?

• Author: Mansour bin Mohammed Al-Assaf
• Publishing House: Dar Madarek for Publishing
• Number of Pages: 320
• Year of Publication: 2017
• ISBN: 9786144298824
• Cover Type: Paperback