"The party had a snack lunch at Taipei while the pilot attended to a snag, which he declared, had been corrected, after a short while.

The plane took off 2.35 P.M. but within a few seconds one of the engines flew out and the plane crashed near the fringe of the Taihoku airfield. The body of the plane broke into two parts and caught fire.

The pilot Takizawa and Gel. Shidei were killed inside the plane. The rest of the crew and passengers came out, but all of them had sustained burn injuries, two of them viz. Ayoagi and Bose had received very severe burns.

The injured persons were carried to the army hospital a few kilometer from the airfield and given medical treatment.

Bose had sustained burn injuries of the third degree and despite the efforts of the doctors to revive him, he succumbed to his injuries the same night.

Of the other injured persons Ayoagi, the second pilot also died.

Two days later, Bose's body was cremated and his ashes were carried to Tokyo in the beginning of September 1945 where they were deposited in the Renkoji Temple."

I have reached the conclusion that the story of the aircrash at the Taihoku airfield in Taiwan and the subsequent death of Bose, resulting from burn injuries sustained by him in the crash must be wholly based on independent witnesses, four of whom were Bose's co-passengers in the plane which crashed, one is the doctor who attended to him and signed his death certificate and several others mentioned in the course of this chapter who have corroborated this story in all material particulars.

I am not prepared to accept the contention that the entire military organization of Japan had entered into a conspiracy to put forward a false story in order to cover up Bose's escape. Such a hypothesis is foreign to reason and to human nature. Most of the witnesses who gave evidence impressed me by their frank and honest demeanour.

The doctor, too, appeared to be a most convincing witness of truth. The criticism advanced against the testimony of these witnesses has been discussed by me in the foregoing pages, and in the end, it is only necessary to say that this criticism does not shake the strengh and the value of the evidence.

I, therefore, find it proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Bose travelled in a Japanese bomber from Touraine to Taihoku on the morning of 18th of August, 1945. At Taihoku the plane stopped for a short time to refuel. The pilot detected a snag in one of the engines.

This was attended to, and the pilot pronounced the aircraft to be airworthy. The propellers of one of the engines had been damaged in a previous accident and the repair carried out did not completely restore the efficiency of the engine. This finally caused the crash at Taihoku, almost immediately after the plane took off. The plane crashed to the ground, broke into two parts and caught fire.