The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (3 page)

• February 26, 1993, World Trade Center Bombing
  
• August 7, 1998, Tanzania and Kenya U.S. Embassy Bombings
  
• October 12, 2000, Yemen USS
  Cole
  Attack
  
• September 11, 2001, U.S. World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Pennsylvania Hijackings
  
• October 12, 2002, Indonesia Bali Bombings
  
• May 12, 2003, Riyadh Western Complex Bombings
  
• March 11, 2004, Madrid Train Bombings
  
• July 7, 2005, U.K. Subway Bombings
  
• July 11, 2010, Uganda World Cup Bombings
  
• January 16, 2013, Algerian Gas Plant Takeover
  
• September 21–24, 2013, Nairobi, Kenya, Westgate Shopping Mall Attack
  

• September 6, 1970, Dawson's Field Multiple Aerial Hijackings
  
• December 21, 1975, Vienna OPEC Hostage-Taking
  
• June 27, 1976, Entebbe
  
• October 13, 1977, Landshut Hijacking and GSG 9 Rescue in Mogadishu
  

• April 18, 1983, U.S. Embassy in Beirut Bombing
  
• October 23, 1983, U.S. Marine and French Paratrooper Barracks in Lebanon Bombing
  
• March 17, 1992, Buenos Aires Israeli Embassy Bombing
  
• July 18, 1994, AIMA Buenos Aires Bombing
  

• June 14, 1995, Budennovsk, Russia, Hospital Hostage-Taking
  
• October 23, 2002, Moscow Theater Takeover
  
• August 24, 2004, Russian Planes Bombing
  
• September 1, 2004, Russia Beslan School Takeover
  
• March 29, 2010, Moscow Subway Bombings
  

• September 5, 1972, Munich Olympics Attack
  

• October 13, 1977, Landshut Hijacking and GSG 9 Rescue in Mogadishu
  
• March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro Kidnapping
  

• December 17, 1996, Japan Embassy in Peru Takeover
  

• August 27, 1979, Mountbatten Assassination
  
• August 15, 1998, Omagh, Northern Ireland, Bombing
  

• March 31, 1970, Japan Airlines Flight 351 Hijacking to North Korea
  
• May 30, 1972, Machine Gun Attack in Lod Airport
  

• June 23, 1985, Air India Flight Bombing
  

• May 15, 1974, Ma'alot Massacre
  
• October 7, 1985, Achille Lauro Seajacking
  
• April 5, 1986, Berlin La Belle Discotheque Bombing
  
• September 5, 1986, Pan Am 73 Hijacking
  
• December 21, 1988, Lockerbie Bombing
  
• September 19, 1989, French Airline UTA 772 Bombing
  

• October 6, 1981, Egypt President Anwar Sadat Assassination
  
• November 17, 1997, Luxor Attack
  
• July 23, 2005, Sharm el-Sheikh Bombing
  
• November 26, 2008, India Mumbai Attacks
  

For anyone obsessed with counting incidents, this list of incidents by terrorist group does not include eight of the
50 Worst
incidents. These eight do not easily fit into a group-specific category because of suspect attribution, a single attack by an organization that did not appear again, or tenuous ties of the individual perpetrating the attack to a formal terrorist organization. In addition, one incident—the October 13, 1977, Landshut Hijacking and GSG 9 Rescue in Mogadishu—appears twice on the list, because it was a joint operation. To provide context for the environments in which these attacks took place, discussions of each decade introduce that book section.

The decade's
worst
depredations, while chilling for their time, have all fallen off the overall list for the half-century. A
50 Worst
list for the decade of the 1960s could include armed attacks by Algerian insurgents, whose domestic attacks against the continuation of French colonial rule on occasion spilled over into the metropole. Algerian independence was seen by many insurgent theorists as evidence of the possibility of a successful terrorism campaign. Palestinian terrorism, particularly with the establishment of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, began to take root in Israel and the occupied territories, and later spread into the rest of the world by the early 1970s. The decade's
50 Worst
could also include examples from the rash of bombings by leftist groups in the United States—including a failed Weather Underground attempt to bomb the U.S. Capitol—and Western Europe, along with the attacks by various Latin American revolutionary groups encouraged by the success of Fidel Castro's insurgent takeover of the reins of power in Cuba.

Many of these groups resorted to aerial hijacking as an excellent method of publicizing their causes by attracting media attention to a telegenic crisis du jour. Copycats, including mentally disturbed individuals, passengers who wanted to upgrade to a first-class flight to Havana, and domestic U.S. black revolutionaries and their white sympathizers, also added to the rolls of the hijackers. The increase of aerial hijackings, which was then viewed by governments as one of the major sources of nonstate threats to the security of its citizens, led to tentative steps by governments to bolster the defensive side of the issue. Hijackings were not yet viewed as a terrorism problem since the majority of attacks were comparatively nonviolent take-me-to-Cuba and take-me-to-Miami capers. From 1968 through 1972, the U.S. Department of Transportation logged 364 hijackings around the world.

The U.S. administration became fed up after eight planes were hijacked to Cuba in January 1969. The Federal Aviation Administration created the Task Force on the Deterrence of Air Piracy, which developed a hijacker profile for use in screening passengers. Magnetometers (metal detectors) were also introduced at the end of the decade.

The international community chipped in with several antihijacking conventions. In 1963, International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) drafted the Convention on Offenses and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft (more commonly referred to as the Tokyo Convention), which required states to promptly return hijacked aircraft and passengers. The convention was silent on the fate of the hijackers. The ICAO next met in The Hague, Netherlands, to create the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft (Hague Convention), which called for states to extradite or try hijackers. The convention deemed hijacking a criminal rather than a political act. In December 1970, fifty nations signed on, including the United States. The ICAO also drafted a Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation, which dealt with acts on the ground against aircraft in service. The Montreal Convention was open for signature in 1971 and went into force in 1973.

Nonterrorist hijackings decreased following the coming into force of the three conventions. Terrorists, however, upped the ante, making their attacks increasingly more deadly and diverting planes to countries whose regimes viewed them as conducting legitimate political acts, vice terrorist attacks, and thus making the conventions irrelevant to the episode at hand.

Many of the
50 Worst
of the 1970s involved some form of hostage-taking, including classical kidnapping in which the perpetrators and their hostage(s) move from the original scene of the crime, barricade-and-hostage operations in which the terrorists and their hostage(s) stay put during the bargaining, and aerial, train, vehicular, and naval hijacking, a melding of the previous two types of hostage incidents.

As had been the case in the 1960s, the terrorist spectaculars tended to take place in affluent countries or in capitals with a large media presence that guaranteed coverage of the exploits of the terrorists. News outlets quickly acceded to their demands for publicity of their manifestoes. The terrorists of the 1970s wanted a lot of people watching. They succeeded. The majority (88%) of international terrorist attacks during this period involved no deaths; only 16 percent involved injuries.

The international community's response to these new types of attacks was mixed. Nations directly affected by hostage-taking soon created elite military units designed to conduct daring rescue operations.

The United Nations created a 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, including Diplomatic Agents (informally known as the Diplomat Convention). The United Nations went through several fits and starts at drafting a companion International Convention against the Taking of Hostages. Regional efforts included the 1971 Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish the Acts of Terrorism Taking the Form of Crimes against Persons and Related Extortion that Are of International Significance (the OAS Convention) and the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism. States sympathetic to various terrorist groups limited the effectiveness of these agreements by raising questions about the definitions of terrorism and hostage-taking, the rights of freedom fighters, extradition and the right of asylum, and sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Foot-dragging on international legal conventions and regional accords was the first stage of a continuum of state support to terrorists, became increasingly worrisome in the 1970s. Allegations of Soviet Union and communist satellite support to Western European and Palestinian revolutionary terrorists were matched by charges against radical Middle Eastern regimes supporting any and all Palestinian terrorist groups. Many terrorist groups, including those who engaged in the sensational incidents that made the
50 Worst
for the decade, benefited from and often owed their existence to the provision of funds, documentation, training, safe haven, arms, explosives, planning, insurance policies for terrorists' families, and other forms of assistance by governments and wealthy nonstate backers. Various sanctions against these patrons led to little change; what change there was usually entailed the support becoming more clandestine and tougher to monitor.

Most of the
50 Worst
from this decade were attributable to the nexus between the West European leftists and the radical Palestinians. Many of the groups cross-trained, shared arms, and even joined each other in collaborative hit teams. The decade also saw a hint of what was to come from Islamist-based terrorist groups with attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tehran and Mecca.

Overview:
The Japanese United Red Army (URA) and its splinter groups in the late 1960s and 1970s were among the most feared terrorist groups in the world. Led by Fusako Shigenobu (who became one of the few prominent female terrorists of her generation, along with Petra Kraus, Ulrike Meinhof, and Leila Khaled), the group initially spread terror in its homeland before offering its services to revolutionaries throughout the world. Members of the newly formed Japanese Red Army (JRA) went on to develop a partnership with George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), conducting joint and contract attacks for the PFLP. Its membership eventually was picked off by authorities in a worldwide manhunt.

The group came to international attention with the daring hijacking to North Korea of a Japan Airlines (JAL) plane. Its profile increased with machine-gun attacks in airports, bombings, counterfeiting, trafficking in women, and other criminal activities. While playing high-stakes hostage negotiation gambits, the group's attack squads generally had an exit strategy and did not seek martyrdom for Marx.

Incident:
On March 31, 1970, a JAL B-727 left Tokyo for Fukuoka, but was hijacked shortly after a 7:30 a.m. takeoff by nine members, ages 16 to 27, of the Japanese URA (Sekigun-ha, Red Army Faction), who wielded samurai swords, daggers, pistols, and pipe bombs and demanded to be flown to Pyongyang, North Korea. The plane carried 3 crew, 4 stewardesses,
and 122 passengers, mostly Japanese, including tourists, businessmen, students, a Roman Catholic Maryknoll priest, doctors on their way to a three-day medical conference in Fukuoka, and two Americans, including Herbert Brill. The terrorists tied up the male passengers, while others passed out candy to the children on board. They tied copilot Teiichi Ezaki to his seat. The pilot, Captain Shinji Ishida, claimed that the plane could not reach North Korea without refueling and landed at Itazuke air base outside Fukuoka at 8:59 a.m. Negotiations continued for five hours; the group allowed 12 children, 10 women, and an ailing elderly man to leave the plane in exchange for refueling. Two escort jets accompanied the plane as it left the air base.

The South Koreans attempted to give the impression to the hijackers that the plane had entered North Korean airspace. They fired antiaircraft shells at the plane, scrambled fighter planes, and escorted it to an airfield that identified itself as Pyongyang but was really Kimpo Airport in Seoul. The airport was disguised to look like what Pyongyang might possibly look like, with soldiers and policeman dressed in communist uniforms. Girls sung greetings, and a bullhorn called for them to enter North Korea. The terrorists saw through the ruse when they spotted an American car parked nearby, as well as a U.S. Northwest Airlines plane and a U.S. Air Force DC-3 parked on the runways. The officials could not produce a photograph of Kim Il Sung and were tripped up on several points of communist dogma. The group threatened to blow up the plane if any more attempts to end the hijacking were made.

The plane was moved to a corner of the airfield. The hijackers flicked the passenger cabin lights continually during the night in an attempt to demoralize the occupants. They also denied attempts to send food aboard, accepting only a few sandwiches. When mechanics wheeled a battery cart near one of the engines, the group interpreted this as meaning that the authorities would try to dismantle one of the engines. The hijackers again threatened to set off the pipe bombs that two of them were carrying. Japanese officials had identified two of the group as wanted on explosives charges—Takamaro Tamiya, 27, the group's leader, and Tsuneo Umeuchi, a medical student—which gave credibility to the threat.