The 1962 South Vietnamese Independence Palace bombing in Saigon was an aerial attack on February 27, 1962 by two dissident Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilots, Nguyen Van Cu and Pham Phu Quoc. The pilots targeted the Independence Palace, the official residence of the President of South Vietnam, with the aim of assassinating President Ngo Dinh Diem and his immediate family, who acted as his political advisors. The pilots stated later that their assassination attempt was in response to Diem's autocratic rule, in which he focused more on remaining in power than on confronting the Vietcong.  Cu and Quoc hoped that the airstrike would expose Diem's vulnerability and trigger a general uprising, but this failed to materialise. One bomb penetrated a room in the western wing where Diem was reading but it failed to detonate, leading the president to claim that he had "divine protection". With the exception of Diem's sister-in-law Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, who escaped with minor injuries, the Ngo family were unscathed; however, three palace staff died and another 30 were injured. Afterwards, Cu managed to escape to Cambodia, but Quoc was arrested and imprisoned. In the wake of the airstrike, Diem became hostile towards the American presence in South Vietnam. Diem claimed that the American media was seeking to bring him down and he introduced new restrictions on press freedom and political association. The media speculated that the United States would use the incident to justify the deployment of combat troops to South Vietnam though, in the event, the US remained circumspect. Domestically, the incident was reported to have increased plotting against Diem by his officers.