The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (5 page)

Netherlands (Pan Am flight 93).
At 10:00
A.M.
, Pan Am flight 93, which was late in getting out of Amsterdam, was hijacked by two Arabs who probably met the FAA profile. They forced the plane to refuel in Beirut before picking up another PFLP member, who flew with the group to Cairo where the plane was destroyed. The trio included Sa'id Ali Ali, Samir Abdel Majid Ibrahim, and Mazin abu Mehanid Khalil, Palestinians whose forebears came from Chad. On board were 152 passengers and 23 crew, including 4 members of a deadheading crew. Two passengers, supposedly students registered in the names of Diop and Gueye, and carrying Senegalese passports, had been denied entry on an El Al plane (which had claimed to have oversold its first-class section). They had booked a flight to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, from which they would fly to Chile. They were to have been part of a PFLP group that was to hijack the El Al flight, but instead seized the 747. Each carried a revolver and hand
grenade and had the plane circle Beirut for two hours because the Lebanese government did not wish to be involved in the incident.

PFLP member Walid Kaddoura talked to the hijackers from the control tower and gave them instructions. A message from Jordan instructed the hijackers to fly to Cairo where the plane was to be destroyed. PFLP Capt. Ali allowed five men to refuel the plane. He was then instructed to separate the Jews from the other passengers, collect their passports, and keep them as hostages after leaving the plane.

Nine PFLP members, including a woman, then boarded the plane armed with .45 caliber pistols and 80 pounds of dynamite. The group's bomb expert stayed on board the plane with a pregnant woman and her husband; the others left. The demolitions expert, in his early twenties, set the fuses before the plane landed. The stewardess activated the emergency chutes and the passengers ran for cover before the $24 million plane was destroyed. In the rush, seven passengers were injured and later hospitalized. The rest went safely to an airport hotel. Egyptian authorities detained the trio of hijackers and began looking for a fourth hijacker they believed had escaped.

The Netherlands (El Al flight 291).
The last attempted hijacking of the day was against El Al flight 291, en route from Tel Aviv to New York, 30 minutes out of its stopover in Amsterdam. It was the only airliner of the four that included armed guards among its 145 passengers and 13 crew. However, the sky marshal of the first-class cabin of the B-707 had been mistakenly locked in the pilot's cabin with pilot Uri Bar-Lev when the attack began. The original plan had called for a four-member PFLP team to hijack the plane. However, two members of the group had been denied boarding and instead hijacked a 747 to Cairo (they did not have navigational plans for Zerka). The duo had orders to meet Leila Khaled of the PFLP and Patrick Joseph Arguello, a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN), in the airport lounge after checking in. However, they made no attempt to warn their compatriots of their failure and boarded the 747, leaving Khaled and Arguello to fend for themselves.

The hijacking began 25 minutes after takeoff. Arguello, armed with a grenade and pistol, held his gun to the head of a stewardess and demanded that the crew open a security door leading to the cockpit. A steward seized his gun arm, but was shot in the chest. Arguello's automatic jammed when he tried to shoot him again. Arguello pulled the pin from his grenade and rolled it down the aisle. An Israeli security man stood up with a drawn revolver in the path of the grenade but was not harmed because the fuse was improperly set. Khaled claims that two or three Israeli security men plus three passengers jumped Arguello, beat him, tied him up, and shot him in the back four times. The Israelis claim that the tall security man shot him once. Khaled tried to use two grenades she had hidden in her bra, but was overpowered by two male passengers. An elderly
American disarmed her. One crew member, Sholomo Vider, was injured by five shots. Israel radioed the pilot and pleaded that he return to Tel Aviv with the injured Khaled. However, he proceeded to London to allow prompt medical attention for Vider. Bar-Lev was criticized by his government for this decision. Arguello died under an oxygen mask in an ambulance, but Vider was saved.

Khaled had previously captured headlines with a hijacking on August 28, 1969. When the plane landed in Heathrow Airport, the El Al security guards refused to let her go, and a tug-of-war ensued, with the Israelis pulling at her legs while the British police grabbed her shoulders. She was held in the Ealing police station. Three days later, the Israelis formally informed the British government that they intended to request extradition of Khaled. The same day, a BOAC jet was hijacked and Khaled's name was added to the list of those the PFLP wanted released. She was flown on board a British RAF Comet on September 29, 1970, when it was announced that the British hostages had been flown to the RAF base in Akrotiri, Cyprus. The Comet made stops in Zurich and Munich to pick up other freed terrorists. On October 1, 1970, the seven Palestinians arrived in Cairo in time for Egyptian President Nasser's funeral, but were not allowed to attend, being kept in a government guesthouse. Eleven days later, they flew to Damascus and Beirut.

On April 23, 1996, she set foot on Palestinian soil for the first time in her adult life to attend a meeting of the Palestinian National Council. She refused to recognize Israel's right to exist.

Overview:
After the United Red Army (URA) hijacking on 1970, the Japanese URA splintered into several factions. Some blended into the radical scene in Japan, while a more dangerous Japanese Red Army (JRA) faction reached out to like-minded revolutionaries and anarchists in the Middle East and Europe. Turning its attention to their colleagues' favorite targets—Israel, the United States, and other Western nations—the JRA offered its services in conducting proxy attacks. They garnered international media headlines by attacking Christian pilgrims on a visit to Israel.

Incident:
On May 30, 1972, three members of the JRA, on contract from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), fired machine guns and threw hand grenades at passengers arriving at Israel's Lod Airport from an Air France flight, killing 28 and wounding 76. Two of the attackers died in the massacre. The plane, Air France flight 132, had arrived from Paris and Rome when the trio picked up their weapons at the luggage area, opened their suitcases, and pulled out their Czechoslovakian-made
VZ-58 automatic rifles, whose butts had been removed, and six shrapnel grenades. The 116 passengers had just deplaned, and about 300 people were crowding into the waiting lounge. The terrorists fired 133 shots from their 7.63 caliber M43 weapons. Among those killed were 16 Puerto Rican Catholic pilgrims on a visit to the Holy Land. Twenty-seven others of the 68-member tour group were injured. Others killed included Israeli professor Aharon Katchalsky, one of the world's foremost biophysicists. One of the terrorists, identified as Yasuyuki Yasuda, was killed accidentally by bullets from the rifle of Takeshi Okudeira (or Okidoro), 23, who was blown up by a grenade. The surviving member of the squad, Kozo Okamoto, 22 or 24, ran onto the tarmac outside the terminal in an attempt to blow up an SAS plane parked outside. He was tackled with two grenades in his hands by El Al traffic officer Hannon Claude Zeiton.

In reconstructing the movements of the group, police discovered that they had carried tiny paper dolls as good luck charms. The group had also used symbolism in their selection of passports. Okamoto claimed to be Daisuke Namba, who had been executed for the attempted assassination of Crown Prince Hirohito in 1923. His birth date was given as December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Jiro Sugisaki, whose real name was Takeshi Okidoro, gave his birthday as February 26, 1937, when Japanese army officers had mutinied. The other dead man, who claimed to be Ken Torio, 23, was Yasuiki Yasuda, who claimed to be born on March 30, the date of the URA's 1970 hijacking of a Japanese airliner. Included among those hijackers was Okamoto's brother.

PFLP spokesman Bassam Towfik Sherif (aka Bassam Zayad) claimed credit for the attack, saying that the group were members of the Squad of the Martyr Patrick Arguello, a Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) member who with Leila Khaled staged a foiled hijacking of an El Al plane on September 7, 1970, in the Netherlands. Bassam gave their PFLP names as Bassem, Salah, and Ahmed and said that the attack was in reprisal for the deaths of two Black September terrorists in the Sabena hijacking of May 6, 1972. After his gang had killed eight Israelis, Okamoto told Israeli officers that the group was named the Army of the Red Star.

Okamoto was initially unwilling to talk to the authorities, asking for death. His interrogator, Gen. Zeevi (who had questioned captured terrorists Tannous and Hallasah in the Sabena hijacking), threw his pistol on the table in front of him and told Okamoto that he could turn it on himself if he signed the confession. Okamoto then began talking (it appears that Zeevi never intended to fulfill his part of the bargain). Okamoto studied agriculture at Kagoshima University in Japan. In early 1970, an Iraqi revolutionary, Bassim (who later married Leila Khaled), visited Tokyo and contacted the JRA. There the two organizations made a movie,
PFLP—Red Army Declare World War
. In November 1971, Okamoto was asked to show the film at Kagoshima and was invited to go to Beirut, where his brother
was undergoing PFLP training. He said he was directed to depart Tokyo and go to Montreal, New York, and Paris. He was to fly first class on an El Al 717, observing security protocols. Upon arriving in Beirut, he was taxied to Baalbek, Lebanon, and stayed in a safe house with the other two JRA members. He recalled training in Port Said in explosives, shooting pistols and Kalashnikovs, and using hand grenades. On May 17, 1972, they trained for the specific attack.

On May 22, 1972, they left Beirut for Paris and arrived in Rome on May 30, 1972. They booked a night in the Anglo American Hotel and then moved to the Scaligera Pension on the Via Nazionale, where Arabs often stayed. On May 30, 1972, they arrived at Leonardo da Vinci Airport for a flight to Tel Aviv. They passed through a body search, but their baggage was not searched. It appears that their trainer was Abu Hija, who had participated in the Zurich attack on February 18, 1969, under the name of Youssef. Maruoka Osamu was the fourth JRA member to be trained with the group and was wanted as an accomplice in the incident.

Okamoto was charged with the military offense of political terrorism, which carried a death penalty under the 1945 British Emergency Regulations, initially applied to Irgun members. Max Kritzman, a Chicago-born attorney, was appointed to be Okamoto's lawyer. Okamoto at first refused any counsel but accepted when told that the trial could not proceed without one. He sabotaged all attempts by Kritzman to provide a defense and tried to convince the court to sentence him to death. Court records quote Okamoto as saying:

Lt. Col. Abraham Frisch, the presiding judge, sentenced Okamoto to life imprisonment.

In interviews since his incarceration, it was learned that Okamoto and his colleagues tore their passports in a lavatory of Lod Airport so that they could not escape, a further expression of their determination to go through with the act. They had also planned to explode their last grenades in their faces to make the job of identifying them much harder. At the last moment, Okamoto apparently decided to attack the SAS plane as well but missed with his last grenades and was captured.

His release was demanded by terrorists in a number of subsequent incidents, including the September 5, 1972, Olympics massacre; a July 20, 1973, JAL hijacking; and the Entebbe affair of July 27, 1976.

Okamoto suffered a mental breakdown in prison. He was part of a swap in May 1985 with Ahmad Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC) in which more than 1,000 Palestinians plus Okamoto were freed in exchange for three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon in 1982.