The incident caused the cabin to lose pressure forcing the captain to perform an emergency landing in Malta, instead of flying off to Libya, as demanded by the criminals. On the plane, there was also an Egyptian security guard who shot one of the terrorists dead before being fired back at. The hijacking – which took on a plane directed to Cairo from Athens – began ten minutes after take-off when three members of the Palestinian militant group Abu Nidal Organisation took control of the plane and started to divide Israeli and American passengers from the rest of the hostages. Until the events of 9/11, the EgyptAir Flight 648 was considered the most infamous hijacking in the history of aviation because of the number of victims – 60 dead – and the number of parties involved. The case resurfaced in 2019 when a Lebanese man was arrested in connection to the incident, but was later released because of a case of mistaken identity. As reported by the BBC, negotiations were carried out and resulted in all other hostages being released. One passenger – 23-year-old US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem – was killed and his body was left on the tarmac of Beirut’s airport. The hijackers, Mohammed Ali Hamadei alongside another person, held the plane’s 153 passengers and crew hostage for 17 days, forcing the plane’s captain to go back and forth several times between Algeria and Lebanon before landing in Beirut.ĭuring the hijacking, the criminals beat a number of the hostages and threatened to kill them if their demands, liberation of hundreds of Lebanese detainees from Israeli prisons, were not met. Trans World Airlines was flying to San Diego from Cairo via multiple cities when it was hijacked after stopping in Athens on its way to Rome. During the operation, the Israeli forces managed to free all passengers except three who were killed in the crossfire. On 4 July, the Israeli forces sent a commando taskforce to free the passengers in a counter-terrorist mission called “Operation Entebbe”. If not met, the hijackers said, they would start killing the hostages. Their demands were $5m and the release of several Palestinian and pro-Palestine militants from Israeli and other countries’ prisons. Once arrived in Entebbe, the perpetrators divided Jewish and Israeli passengers from the others, keeping the former as hostages and freeing the latter. The flight’s schedule included a layover in Athens and that was when the four armed terrorists took over the plane, demanding captain Michel Bacos fly to Libya for refuelling before landing in Uganda, where they were welcomed by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who had known about the hijacking from the beginning. Two of them were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Palestinian militant organisation infamous for carrying out hijackings during the 1960s and 1970s, while the other ones belonged to the Red Army Faction, a German left-wing terrorist organisation. Departing from Tel Aviv en route to Paris, Air France’s Flight 139 was hijacked on 27 June 1976 by four people.
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