The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (4 page)

The following day the temperature in the cabin rose to 107 degrees, and the hijackers allowed food, water, cigarettes, and blankets on board. They had also let slip their 8:00
A.M.
deadline for clearance to fly out of Seoul. They were often extremely agitated and gave the impression that they were serious about harming the passengers despite their general politeness. Japanese Ambassador Masahide Kanayama urged caution on the part of the South Koreans.

Japanese vice minister of transportation Shinjiro Yamamura flew to Seoul to negotiate with the hijackers, along with the ambassador, who had established radio contact with the hijackers, the captain, and two of the passengers. Yamamura offered to become a substitute hostage. When they
learned of Yamamura's plan, the South Koreans objected. The hijackers agreed to allow the plane to be moved to a takeoff position, to allow passenger baggage to be removed, to release 50 passengers, to allow Yamamura to board, and to then release the other 50, at which time the plane would fly to North Korea.

During the flight to North Korea, Pyongyang made ominous warnings about the possible incarceration and torture of the hostages. The plane never reached Pyongyang airport but landed in North Korean territory. The hijackers bounded from the plane and struck karate poses, acting as heroes. The North Koreans confiscated their weapons and separated them from the hostages, who were questioned in a local hotel. The communists announced that the hijackers would be given political asylum. On Saturday, they informed Yamamura and the crew that they were illegal immigrants. Yamamura had heard reports from former hijack victims that they had been beaten while held in North Korea and also recalled that the crew of the USS
Pueblo
was still being held. However, his group was allowed to leave. The jet returned to Tokyo on April 5. On April 6, North Korean broadcasts called the hijackers “strangers who came uninvited.”

Sources differ as to the identity of the hijackers. During the attack, the 16-year-old identified himself as “Boya,” who had played hooky from Kobe High School that day. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) identified the group as O. Takeshi, W. Mariaki, A. Shiro, S. Yasumiro, K. Takahiro, A. Kimihiro, Takamaro Tamiya, 27, Yoshizo Tanaka, 25, and Kintaro Yoshida, 24. Various sources claim that Kozo Okamoto, a brother of a hijacker, was involved in the Lod Airport massacre on May 30, 1972.

Two years later, eight of the hijackers met in North Korea with visiting Japanese journalists and informed them that they felt that the hijacking had been a mistake.

Three lawyers representing Yasuhiro Shibata, a URA member indicted for the hijacking, left for Pyongyang on January 8, 1989, to obtain evidence. Shibata's trial was to begin on January 23, 1989. The lawyers planned to contact the six other URA members who had remained in North Korea to determine Shibata's motives for secretly returning to Japan. Shibata, 35, was arrested in Tokyo in May 1988. Tamiya, 45, had sent a note to a Japanese magazine in May saying that all of the hijackers wanted to return to Japan but wanted to reach an agreement with the Japanese government that they be tried without detention when they came home. One of the hijackers had already died in North Korea.

On January 9, 1990, Yukio Yamanaka, head of a support group known for its aid to imprisoned student demonstrators, said that he had met with four of the seven hijackers living in Pyongyang during his visit which began on January 2. Tamiya said that the group had no interest in returning home to be arrested but added that he wanted to negotiate with the Japanese government.

On June 23, 1990, the hijackers wrote a two-page letter to
Mainichi Shimbun
in which the group urged the Japanese government to start negotiations regarding their possible return to Japan. However, they said that they would not surrender only to be arrested in Japan.

On June 13, 1992, five women rejected a Foreign Ministry order to give up their passports. The five were among six Japanese women who went to North Korea to marry the hijackers. The ministry ordered the five women in August 1988 to hand over their passports because they offended the country's interests by having contacts with North Korean agents. The ministry did not seek the return of the sixth woman's passport. The Association in Support of Humanitarian Return of Hijackers of Yodo Airliner called on the government to permit them to return to Japan without being subjected to criminal charges. North Korea continued to reject Japanese requests for extradition.

On January 29, 1994, the news media reported that Takahiro Konishi, 49, ran a letter in a URA sympathizers' newsletter stating that he wanted his eldest daughter, 16, who is stateless, “to study together with her Japanese friends in the land of her ancestors.” He became the sixth URA hijacker to express interest in returning to Japan. This was the first time a letter with a hijacker's name reached Japan from North Korea. He thanked the sympathizers for their letters and gifts, and said he “was able to understand the warmness of Japanese relatives” at a meeting three and a half years earlier in Pyongyang. The seven families of the hijackers include 17 children. Konishi said he wanted to send his oldest daughter and her 14-year-old sister to Japan that summer.

On March 24, 1996, Cambodian police arrested a person believed to be Yoshimi Tanaka, 47, wanted for the hijacking. He was arrested on the Cambodian border for possession of several million dollars (face value) of counterfeit U.S. currency. Authorities handed him over to Thai police in Pattaya. Japanese police went there to fingerprint him and confirm his identity. The arrested man attempted to cross the border from Vietnam in a North Korean Embassy Mercedes. He was carrying a North Korean diplomatic passport. Three other North Korean diplomats attempted to bribe a policeman with $50,000 to let them pass through the checkpoint. Warrants had been issued on January 2, 1996, for Tanaka and four Thai men after they used five counterfeit U.S. $100 bills to buy film from a photo shop in Nong Preu village in North Phattaya. Thai police had earlier arrested the four Thais and seized sophisticated counterfeiting equipment from a home in Ang Thong Province. They claimed that Tanaka had hired them to produce the counterfeit notes, which resembled the newly designed $100 bill.

The Japanese terrorist was believed to have worked with Somchai Nanthasan and Prasong Pholthiphet to forge the $100 bills. Police also believed that Tanaka was helped to launder the bills by Kodama International Trading, run by Tang Cheang Tong, alias Shogo Kodama, a Japanese citizen of Khmer–Chinese origin.

Bangkok's
Asia Times
reported that in 1994, the Philippine military arrested Eduardo Quitoriano, 41, the Communist Party of the Philippines international liaison officer to the JRA. He allegedly was involved in a $1.6 million counterfeiting case that was wrapped up in Switzerland in 1990.

On March 26, 1996, Tanaka was extradited to Thailand to face forgery charges. The United States, South Korea, and Japan sought extradition from Thailand. Tanaka was indicted on April 11, 1996. He denied involvement in the case before a court on April 12. He was scheduled to be tried in June 1996.

The hijackers were reported in 2002 by the
Washington Post
to have been involved in efforts to lure Japanese, particularly women, to North Korea. Key to these efforts was Tamiya, leader of the hijackers, who died in 1995. He hoped to use the women to create another generation of revolutionaries in the Japanese Revolution Village in North Korea. In testimony in Tokyo District Court on March 12, 2002, Megumi Yao, 46, former wife of a JRA member, said that she helped lure Keiko Arimoto, 23, a Japanese woman, from Copenhagen to Pyongyang in 1983 as part of the scheme. The
Post
quoted her as saying, “The assignment was to scout for and detain Japanese, and train them into core members of a revolution.” Yao was testifying in the trial of another JRA ex-wife charged with passport law violations.

As of this writing, the other hijackers are believed to still be in North Korea.

Overview:
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) preceded by three decades al Qaeda's 9/11 quadruple aerial hijacking operation. The group dominated world headlines in September 1970 by diverting several European-origin planes to Dawson's Field in Jordan. The Jordanian regime's ultimate reaction to the Palestinian radicals' challenge, eventually dubbed Black September, in turn led to the formation of a rival Black September Organization (BSO).

West Germany.
On September 6, 1970, at 12:20
P.M
., two PFLP members took over Trans World Airlines (TWA) flight 741, a B-707 flying from Frankfurt to New York with 145 passengers and 10 crew. The plane was diverted to Dawson's Field, Zerka, Jordan, a former U.K. Royal Air Force (RAF) landing strip in the desert. This was the first of a well-coordinated series of hijackings carried out by the PFLP. The group demanded the
release of three PFLP members held in West Germany for the attack on the airline bus in Munich on February 10, 1970; three held in Switzerland for the Zurich attack on the El Al plane that had resulted in the killing of the copilot on February 18, 1969; and an unspecified number of fedayeen held in Israeli prisons. They later demanded release of Leila Khaled, held in a British jail after an unsuccessful hijacking attempt in the Netherlands. The group threatened to blow up the planes with the passengers inside by 3:00 a.m. on Thursday, September 10, 1970.

A Beirut spokesman for the PFLP explained in a statement to the news media that U.S. planes were seized “to give the Americans a lesson after they supported Israel all these years” and to retaliate for U.S. peace initiatives in the Middle East.

Upon landing, the guerrillas allowed 127 passengers from the planes at Dawson Field, mostly women and children, to go free in Amman. The remaining hostages were men from West Germany, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the United States. The planes were surrounded by commandos, who in turn were surrounded by troops from Jordan's army, including 50 tanks and armored cars. The Swiss and Germans were willing to deal unilaterally with terrorists to free their own nationals, but British Prime Minister Edward Heath called upon all five governments to take a common position. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representative M. Rochat, who had acted as intermediary in the Athens Seven case on July 22, 1970, told the PFLP in Amman of their stand, which was to release the seven prisoners upon the release of all passengers. The Germans sent Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, a German Social Democrat party member, to Amman to negotiate on September 7, 1970. On September 11, two more Americans were released from the TWA jet. Another 18 hostages were secretly taken to Zerka and hidden in homes, because the attack squad began to distrust their PFLP leaders in Amman and wanted extra insurance against a double cross.

The Israelis preferred to be observers in the Berne Five, and thus the Red Cross was named by only four of the members as their intermediaries. A three-member liaison group of Red Cross officials went to Amman to confer with PFLP members. The hijacking of the BOAC VC-10 led to an extension of the deadline in hopes that the United States would have more time to pressure Israel to capitulate. On September 12, 1970, the PFLP gave a five-minute warning that women and children would be released in Amman. The planes held at Dawson's Field were evacuated and destroyed by PFLP explosives experts. On September 13, the last West German hostages were freed. Fifty-eight hostages remained, including the 18 secretly held in Zerka.

The activities of the PFLP on Jordanian territory proved too much for King Hussein to tolerate, and Jordanian troops engaged the fedayeen in a series of bloody battles in what became known as Black September, in which approximately 7,000 died. Negotiations became of secondary
importance to the embattled PFLP, and hostages were rescued sequentially by Jordanian army troops. On September 29, 1970, the Swiss government announced that seven Arab guerillas would be released by Switzerland, West Germany, and the United Kingdom when the Americans had safely left Jordan. They called upon Israel to release 10 Lebanese soldiers and 2 Algerians taken from an airliner on August 14, 1970, as a humanitarian gesture. The seven were released the next day.

Switzerland.
At 1:14
P.M
., a Swissair DC-8 carrying 143 passengers and 12 crew was seized over France 30 minutes out of Zurich on its New York–bound flight by two men and a woman belonging to the PFLP. The plane landed in Zerka, almost on the tail of the TWA plane. The PFLP demanded the release of Leila Khaled for the British passengers (this was a bluff because no British passengers were held at the time), three terrorists in West Germany for the German passengers, three terrorists in Switzerland for the Swiss passengers, and an unspecified number of guerrillas in Israeli jails for the Israeli and American passengers. (On August 15, 1970, it was reported that there were 34 Arabs in Israeli jails.) The guerrillas set a 72-hour deadline. The next day, the guerrillas released 127 women and children in return for the Jordanian army's retreating 2 miles from the planes. On September 12, 1970, PFLP operations chief Dr. Wadi Haddad ordered the destruction of the planes in Zerka. A $30 million plane was reduced to rubble in the blast.

During negotiations, the commandos became suspicious of the intentions of their leaders and moved some of the hostages to Amman. They also turned away Red Cross supplies and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) buses that had been sent to collect the hostages. However, they did let another 23 hostages into Amman, most of them Indians. Of those hostages remaining, all but 38, including 5 Israeli girls, were allowed to go to the hotel. The 38 were split up and sent to various locations in Amman. These included nationals of Israel, Switzerland, West Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.