The 1980s were the last hurrah of communist state sponsorship, and concomitantly, of the European Left, many of whom died, were detained, stayed in jail, stayed in hiding, or renounced terrorism and effectively retired. The end of communist control of Eastern Europe at the end of the decade led to the winnowing away of the European leftist terrorist movement as well. The breakup of the Soviet empire left The Left with few revolutionary regimes to serve as role models—few saw Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, or China as saviors of the Marxist revolution, with China moving economically, if not declaratively, toward aggressive capitalism.
The leftists were replaced in the next decade by al Qaeda, whose antecedents arrived in 1981 with the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat. The al-Gama’at al-Islamiyyah assassins later melded with al Qaeda at the behest of Gama’at leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri later became Osama bin Laden’s deputy and then his successor following his death.
The key focus of Western government responses to terrorism in the 1980s was the debate over the extent of Soviet and satellite assistance given to terrorists. Radical Middle Eastern regimes were also in the conversation over how to stop terrorism by stopping patron state support. The bombing of La Belle disco, although not particularly bloody, led the United States to use its military might to retaliate. The air raid on Tripoli did not dent Mu’ammar Qadhafi’s willingness to attack Western targets, however, and just over two years later, Libyan-sponsored bombers struck against Pan Am 103 and a year later, a French Union des Transports Aériens (UTA) flight.
Successes by governments against hijackings and barricade-and-hostage operations led terrorists to again shift tactics. Hijackings went down in part because countries revamped airline security after the United States publicized the names of international airports that were inadequate in their antiterrorist security measures. The worst in the 1980s tended to be attacks that caused dozens of deaths, usually involving methods of transportation, including planes, trains, and ships, with the occasional diplomatic or official facility included. Pressure against state support to some terrorist groups led them to coordinate operations with each other, as seen with Direct Action, the Combatant Communist Cells, and the Italian Red Brigades in the middle of the decade.
While many of the worst involved multiple deaths, of particular note for the decade is that deaths and injuries from all terrorist attacks had outrun the body counts of previous decades. The more spectacular terrorism events appeared to have a trickle-down effect on “normal” attacks.
Overview: Separatist, left-wing, and Palestinian terrorists received the bulk of media attention and conducted most of the terrorist attacks in the 1980s. In Italy, the Red Brigades, Communist Fighting Cells, Organized Communist Movement, and like-minded revolutionaries were responsible for thousands of low-level attacks. Right-wing terrorists were not silent, just not as prolific in explosives and media ink. That said, one of the most devastating attacks in all Europe was conducted by a right-wing Italian group at the beginning of the 1980s, presaging mass casualty train attacks in following decades by al Qaeda and Indian groups.
Incident: On August 2, 1980, a bomb containing 200 pounds of TNT exploded in the crowded waiting rooms and restaurant of Bologna, Italy’s main rail station, killing 84 and injuring more than 400 people. Most of the victims of the 10:25 a.m. blast were Italians. The bodies of a Japanese man and a French woman were also found in the rubble. Two American brothers were injured. Callers claimed the Red Brigades were responsible, but later calls denied the charge. The Organized Communist Movement also denied credit. Another caller said the neofascist Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, NAR) set the bomb in retaliation for a Bologna judge’s decision that morning to try eight people for the August 4, 1974, bombing of a passenger train inside a tunnel between Bologna and Florence, which killed 12 and injured 35. Police suggested that the crash of the Italian domestic airlines DC-9 in the Tyrhenian Sea on June 27, 1980, may have been caused by a rightist bomb, as was claimed in the same phone call. All 81 on board the flight died.
On August 4, 1980, French police arrested Marco Affatigato, 24, an Italian neofascist. He was extradited on September 5, 1980. He had been wanted by Rome since 1978 and had been sentenced in absentia the previous month by a Pisa court to three and a half years for helping Mario Tuti, one of the train bombers, escape from prison. (Tuti was recaptured.)
On August 16, 1980, an arrest warrant was issued against neo-Nazi Luca de Orazi, 17, who was charged with subversion. On August 29, 1980, police raids in Rome and two other cities netted a dozen suspects. Warrants for 16 others were issued. On October 11, 1982, Bolivia expelled to Italy Pier Luigi Tagliari.
On February 17, 1983, Spain arrested seven people suspected of being involved in the Bologna bombing and the bombing of a Paris synagogue.
On December 12, 1985, Bologna magistrates issued warrants for 16 people. Included were three former chiefs of the Italian Intelligence and Military Security Service (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, SISMI): Gen. Pietro Musumeci, former assistant director; Col. Giuseppe Belmonte; and Francesco Pazienza, currently imprisoned in the United States. A warrant was also issued for Licio Gelli, the head of the underground P-2 Masonic Lodge. Gelli, who allegedly was involved in tax frauds and financial scandals that brought down the Christian Democratic government in 1982, escaped from a Swiss prison in 1983. The three service chiefs were sentenced to heavy prison terms in July 1984 in connection with illicit SISMI activities on charges of conspiracy, embezzlement, arms and explosives infringements, and “interference in magistrates’ investigations.” Police arrested Professor Fabio de Felice, who was believed to be the right-wing terrorist leader who organized the bombing. Others charged with “complicity in a massacre and forming an armed gang” included Paolo Signorelli, leader of the NAR, Italy’s principal right-wing terrorist group; Massimiliano Facchini; and Stefano Delle Chiaie, sought abroad for the past 15 years. Some of those charged were already serving prison sentences, including Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro, who had been recently married in prison.
On July 11, 1988, a Bologna court sentenced Valerio Fioranvanti, Mambro, Facchini, and Sergio Picciafuoco, all members of extreme rightist groups, to life sentences for setting off the bomb. Gelli was acquitted of the charge of masterminding the attack for lack of evidence. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail on charges of trying to throw investigators off the track, as were Pazienza and ex-SISMI officers Gen. Musumeci and Col. Belmonte. The court then reduced the sentences by five years for Gelli and three for the other trio. Right-wing extremists Delle Chiaie, Facchini, and Signorelli were acquitted of subversion charges for lack of evidence.
On July 13, 1988, the neofascist group Comrades in Jail bombed central Rome’s Piazza Independenza near the central train station, injuring Emilio Manni, 46, a sanitation worker who was emptying the bin in which the bomb was placed inside a Coca-Cola can.
On May 15, 1989, the British government announced that it had no reason to expel Roberto Fiore, Marcello de Angelis, Massimo Morzello, and Stefano Tiraboschi, all members of the neofascist Third Position (Terza Posizione), who were sentenced in absentia by an Italian court on charges of participation in an armed gang. They were also suspected of involvement in the Bologna bombing.
On July 19, 1990, the Bologna assizes appeals court overturned four of the life sentences. Cleared of any involvement in carrying out the bombing were neofascists Fioravanti, Mambro, Facchini, and Picciafuoco, who were all sentenced to life in the first trial. Gelli, 71, and former Secret Service agent Pazienza were both acquitted of slander and planting false evidence to mislead investigators. Former SISMI officials Gen. Musumeci and Col. Belmonte saw their 10-year sentences for subversion dropped. The court also reduced the sentences for armed insurrection against Fioravanti to 13 years, Mambro to 12 years, Gilberto Cavallini to 11 years, and Egidio Giuliani to 8 years. Others cleared by the ruling included Signorelli, who was up for a life sentence, and Roberto Rinani. For the appeals court, the act of association for subversion did not exist and thus cleared of all charges Gelli, Musumeci, Belmonte, and fascist extremists Delle Chiaie, Paolo Tilgher, Marco Ballan, and Maurizio Giorgi.
On April 13, 1993, shortly after midnight, Interpol agents arrested Italian right-wing terrorist Augusto Caucci, 42, in an apartment at 2400 Sarmiento Street in the Once District of Buenos Aires. He was charged with involvement in the attack at the Bologna rail road station. He was believed to be an explosives expert. He had lived in Argentina for a decade.
Overview: Egyptian president Mohammed Anwar al-Sadat’s signing of a peace accord with Israel made him anathema to radical Arabs across the Middle East and in Egypt. Numerous groups denounced the treaty and Sadat personally. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who three decades later rose to the leadership of al Qaeda, led a fledgling band of Islamist militants in opposition to Sadat’s lean to the West and Western political and cultural touchstones. Recruiting coreligionists across a wide spectrum of Egyptian society, including the armed forces, the radicals were able to plot a successful assassination of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. A crack down on the oppositionists by Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, was soon in coming, but the group continued its string of antiregime attacks for decades to come. Mubarak ruled the country for another 30 years before his ouster by the Arab “street” in the Arab Spring of 2011.
Incident: On October 6, 1981, at about 12:40 P.M., Egyptian president Sadat was assassinated in a hail of automatic rifle fire and grenade explosions as he stood in review of a military parade in Nasr City celebrating Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973. At least 9 others, including government officials and foreign diplomats, were killed, and 38 others injured.
While the attention of those in the reviewing stand was diverted by a spectacular air show of overflying Mirages, a Soviet truck hauling a new South Korean–manufactured field artillery piece came to a stop parallel to the stand, 15 yards away. The assassination team forced the driver to stop. Lt. Khaled Ahmed Shawki Islambouli (also identified as 2nd Lt. Khaled Attallah) led the assassins off the truck. He had given his assigned men a vacation and recruited in their place two civilians with past military service and an officer on inactive reserve. The group advanced on the reviewing stand unmolested by the bodyguards, who ran for cover. The terrorists fired at almost point-blank range, hitting Sadat with 28 bullets. Sadat was rushed onto a helicopter, still alive, but pronounced dead at 3:00 P.M. Three of the terrorists were reported killed at the scene, while other media reports said three were captured.
The press reported that the dead included chief chamberlain Hassan Allam; Sadat’s official photographer Mohamed Rashwan; an Omani battalion commander; Bishop Samuel, member of the caretaker Papal Council of the Coptic Orthodox Church; Samir Hilmi, chairman of the Central Accounts Administration; Army Chief of Staff Gen. ‘Abd Rabb an-Nabi Hafiz; a security guard; and two unidentified persons.
The wounded included the North Korean ambassador, presidential assistant Sayyid Mar’I, Sadat’s private secretary Fawzi Abdel Hafez, Belgian ambassador Claude Ruelle, Irish defense minister James Tully, Egyptian defense minister Abdel Hamlim Abu Ghazala, CBS News correspondent Mitchell Krauss, several other Egyptians, U.S. Air Force Capt. Christopher Ryan, U.S. Marines Maj. Gerald R. Agenbroad, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Charles D. Loney, and Richard McCleskey, a Raytheon employee. Vice President Mubarak, who succeeded Sadat and was seated next to him, was uninjured, despite the assassins’ plans to mount a coup by killing the members of the administration seated at the reviewing stand. Maj. Gen. Mahmoud Masri, commander of the Republican Bodyguard, claimed that 12 members of his staff were wounded. He was unable to explain why the security forces turned and ran during the attack, nor how civilians snuck onto the trucks with live ammunition, which was not to be issued for the parade.
The next day, 54 policemen were killed and more than 100 wounded in clashes with Muslim fundamentalists in Asyut after the group launched coordinated attacks from 10 cars at dawn against two police stations, security headquarters, and a police unit guarding a mosque. Six militants died and four were wounded. The extremists were part of a group that had seen 1,500 of their number arrested the previous month by Sadat in an anti-insurgent move against al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya.
On October 17, 1981, investigators linked Lt. Col. Abu Abdel Latif Zomor, who was captured in a gun battle between police and Muslim extremists at the Giza pyramids, with the attack. His brother and three others were also arrested.
One of the assassins, a major, had a brother who had been arrested in the September 1981 crack down.
The group Takfir wa Hijra (Repentant and Holy Flight) was blamed, as was Libyan leader Qadhafi and the Muslim Brotherhood. In Beirut, the exiled Egyptian opposition group known variously as the Independent Organization for the Liberation of Egypt and the Rejection Front for the Liberation of Arab Egypt, headquartered in Tripoli, Libya (and, according to the Egyptian press, given $3 million by Qadhafi), claimed credit. The group was headed by Saadeddin Shazli, a former Egyptian general who was chief of staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces between 1971 and 1973 and who subsequently broke with Sadat.
The assassins admitted that the ammunition had been purchased in the Upper Nile town of Deshna, 325 miles south of Cairo.
Police later arrested 356 Muslims affiliated with the terrorist organization that killed Sadat.
On November 12, 1981, twenty-four people were indicted for the murder. Sadat’s assassins were listed as Lt. Islambouli, the commander of the artillery squad; Atta Tayem Hamida Rahim, an engineer and former reserve officer in the Egyptian Air Defense Command; Sgt. Hussein Abbas Mohammed, a member of the Home Guard; and Abdel Halim Abdel Salim Abdel Ali, a stationery store owner. Abdel Salam Farag, 27, a Cairo engineer and civilian leader of the El Jihad terrorist group, was charged with “complicity and instigation” for publishing the book Absent Duty, of which only 500 copies have been printed and which served as the assassins’ ideological guide. A furniture dealer, three university students, and an 18-year-old high school student were accused of conspiracy. A blind mullah, Sheikh Omar Ahmed Abdel Rahman, 43, a theology professor from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University who had recently taught at Asyut, was also indicted for saying “It is God’s will,” when told of the assassination plot. Rahman later figured prominently in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City and a plot to bomb other New York City landmarks in 1993.
On March 6, 1982, chief judge Maj. Gen. Samir Fadel Attia announced that the 3-man military court had convicted and sentenced 22 of the 24 defendants. The blind sheikh was acquitted. Lt. Col. Zomor, 35, a member of the army’s intelligence service, and his student brother, Tariq Zomor, were sentenced to life. Defendant Mohammed Salamouni read a statement in English, saying “Sadat made of himself the last pharaoh in our country. He made of himself the last shah. Sadat killed himself by his behavior here in Egypt.” At the noisy trial, the defendants—who were eventually caged for their outbursts—claimed that they had been tortured while in prison. Ignoring all clemency appeals, President Mubarak accepted the death sentences for the four assassins and Farag. On April 15, 1982, Lt. Khaled Ahmed Shawki Islambouli, 24, and Sgt. Hussein Abbas Mohammed, 28, were killed by a firing squad, while the three civilians were hanged.
On July 17, 1988, three members of the Jihad Organization who were serving life sentences for the assassination escaped from Turrah prison at dawn after attacking two prison guards. The trio were identified as Khamis Muhammad Musallam, Muhammad Mahmud Salih al-Aswani, and ‘Isamal-Din Muhammad Kamal al-Qamari. The interior ministry offered a large financial reward. On July 25, 1988, Egyptian police fatally shot Qamari in a gun battle in the Shobra district of Cairo. Two policemen were wounded when Qamari fired a submachine gun and threw two grenades at the police, allowing the two other fugitives to escape. Police found grenades and explosives at their hideout, owned by another Muslim fundamentalist.
On November 5, 1993, Montasser Zayyat, defense lawyer for several militant Muslims standing trial in military courts, said in an interview that Switzerland had granted political asylum to Egyptian militant leader Zawahiri, accused by Egypt of relaunching the Vanguards of Conquest (New Jihad) group that assassinated President Sadat. Zayyat said his client applied for asylum six months earlier, and it was granted the previous week. Corinne Goetschel, a Swiss justice ministry spokeswoman, told the press, “This is not true. There is no one of that name who has applied for political asylum nor been granted political asylum in Switzerland.” She did not know whether Zawahiri had used another name in such a request. Zawahiri served three years in jail in connection with Sadat’s murder. He had no other legal charges pending against him in Egypt.
On February 22, 1994, Copenhagen’s Politiken ran an article on Tal’at Fu’ad Qassim, one of the leaders of the organization that killed Sadat and who still conducted terrorist attacks in Egypt. Qassim was identified as instigating terrorist attacks against Danish firms and Danish tourists in Egypt from his home in the Copenhagen area. He was under a death sentence for his part in the Sadat case. In 1981, he was arrested as a leader of the banned Holy War ( Jihad). In 1989, he escaped while being moved with other prisoners. Traveling through the Sudan and Peshawar, Pakistan, he reached Afghanistan, where he became one of the leaders of the Muslim fundamentalist volunteers aiding the mujahideen in fighting the Russians. Egypt had requested his extradition, but Qassim was given asylum from the death sentence by Denmark. He was known for his links to al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya. The Egyptian newspaper al-Ahali interviewed him, noting that he threatened foreign tourists and investments in Egypt, including Danish firms operating in Egypt and the 2,000 Danish tourists who holiday there each year. Qassim told the paper, “Tourism is a nonIslamic source of income which helps keep the present government in power, and foreigners have been warned to stay away from Egypt.”
Overview: By the early 1980s, law in Lebanon had broken down and Beirut, often referred to as the Paris of the Middle East, had deteriorated into an ungovernable city, split between various factions that held turf rather than governed. Snipers and bombers roamed the city at will, threatening locals and foreigners alike. Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, and their adherents often targeted Westerners, kidnapping them and holding them for years until releasing them, sometimes dead, sometimes alive. In 1983, anti-U.S. militants upped the ante with massive car bomb attacks against the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine barracks.
Incident: On April 18, 1983, a U.S. Embassy car, which had been stolen in southern Lebanon, broke through a security barrier in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. An unidentified man then abandoned the vehicle just before it blew up, causing the collapse of the central section of the seven-story embassy building. Sixty-four people, including the fleeing terrorist, 17 Americans, 32 local embassy staffers, and 14 visa applicants and passersby, were killed in the blast. Another 123 people were wounded. The top Mideast expert from the Central Intelligence Agency, Robert Ames, and the deputy director of the Agency for International Development, William McIntyre, were among the dead, which also included members of the Departments of Defense and State. Even though Iran dissociated itself from the bomb attack, the Iranian-based Islamic Jihad (Muslim Holy War) claimed responsibility. The booby-trapped car was filled with 330 pounds of Hexogene, equivalent to 1,320 pounds of TNT. Many of the injured were in the visa applications section of the embassy.
On July 26, 1985, a Lebanese military magistrate charged four extremists: Hussein Saleh Harb and Mahmoud Moussa Dairaki, both Lebanese; Muhammad Nayif al-Jada’, a Palestinian; and Sami Mahmoud Hujji, an Egyptian. Harb and Hujji were also charged with the 1981 bombing of the Iraq Embassy in Beirut that killed 48. By May 1986, Harb had been freed on £200,000 bail, after having been captured and held for some time. In November 1986, the military court magistrate called for the death sentence for six extremists accused of the U.S. Embassy bombing, including the four just named, all of whom were at large. At least eight others were suspected of having aided the accused in the bombing.
On April 30, 1993, a military court ruled that the suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy was a political crime and could not be punished under the political amnesty law. The ruling protected the accused, identified as Hussein Saleh Harb, Sami Mahmud al-Hijjah, Mahmud Musa al-Dirani, Muhammad Nayif al-Jada’, Hasan Muhammad Harb, and ‘Ali Mustafa Haydar. The ruling also considered the assassination of French military attaché Christian Gouttiere on September 18, 1986, as covered by the political amnesty law.
The United States announced that it would close the U.S. offices of the Lebanese-based Middle East Airlines.
On May 12, 1993, a military appeals court presided over by Judge Shaykh Amin Nassar overruled the lower court. The case was to be submitted to the Judiciary Council.
On May 14, 1993, the Islamic Jihad protested the Lebanese government’s decision to repeal the military court’s ruling on the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Munif’ Uwaydat, attorney general at the Court of Appeals, prepared the request for repealing the ruling regarding military court’s standing in the case of the bombing. The military appeals court said in its repeal that crimes committed against foreign diplomatic missions were not covered by the law.
On April 7, 2003, U.S. Agency for International Development official Anne Dammarell took the stand in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., as the lead plaintiff in a $5 billion lawsuit against Iran, identified as the sponsor of the bombing. Dammarrell was blown through a wall and sustained 19 broken bones, glass embedded in her skin, and posttraumatic stress disorder. More than 90 plaintiffs joined the suit. On September 8, 2003, U.S. district judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran had sponsored the bombing and awarded $129 million to 29 American victims and family members. Dammarell was awarded $6.7 million. Yvonne Ames, wife of Robert Ames, and their six grown children were awarded $38.2 million. Bates ruled that the plaintiffs were not entitled to punitive damages.
Overview: Soon after the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Hizballah followed up with a coordinated attack against two military forces they deemed hostile. Hizballah exceeded the previous body count, and the U.S. administration contemplated pulling out of Lebanon.
Incident: On October 23, 1983, a yellow Mercedes truck, packed with 2,000 pounds of a plastic explosive equivalent to 6 tons of TNT, drove through a barbed-wire perimeter fence and then passed a sandbag sentry post before coming to rest in the lobby of the Battalion Landing Team building, housing some of the U.S. Marines at Beirut International Airport. The ensuing blast created a crater 30 feet deep and 120 feet across and caused the four-story building to collapse instantly into smoldering rubble. Windows over a half mile away were shattered by the explosion. The 6:20 A.M. blast killed 241 American servicemen and injured over 80. Marine sentries were unable to fire on the truck because their weapons were kept unloaded per orders. A heavy iron gate placed between the barbed-wire fence and the ill-fated building had apparently been left open, allowing easy access for the suicide bomber.
About 20 seconds after the blast, a second suicide bomber dr ove his car into the eight-story apartment building housing 110 French paratroopers. When the bomb detonated, the building folded, one floor upon the other, killing 58 soldiers and injuring at least 15 others. The second blast was 2 miles to the north of the airport in the Ramel el-Baida district in central Beirut.
In a phone call to Agence France-Presse (AFP) offices in Beirut and Paris, Islamic Holy War (Islamic Jihad) claimed responsibility for both blasts. The caller issued the following statement:
We are the soldiers of God and we crave death. Violence will remain our only path if they [foreign forces] do not leave. We are ready to turn Lebanon into another Vietnam. We are not Iranians or Syrians, or Palestinians. We are Lebanese Muslims who follow the dicta of the Koran.
Islamic Jihad is closely linked to Hizballah (Party of God), whose leader was the radical Shi’ite Muslim Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. Fadlallah’s headquarters were in Baalbek, Lebanon. Husayn Musawi, Fadlallah’s strongman, headed the Islamic Amal faction, which was associated with Hizballah. The Islamic Amal had ties to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Newspaper reports linked the Islamic Amal, Fadlallah, and Musawi to the two blasts.
In an anonymous call to AFP, the suicide bombers were identified as Abu Mazin, 26, and Abu Sijan, 24. In another call to AFP, the Free Islamic Revolution Movement (aka the Islamic Revolutionary Movement) claimed responsibility for the bombings. The linkage between Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, Islamic Amal, and the Free Islamic Revolution Movement is difficult to untangle.
On November 9, 1994, First Investigating Military Judge Riyad Tali’ issued judicial warrants to the Lebanese Army Intelligence Directorate, the State Security Intelligence Department, the Internal Security Forces, and the Judicial Police, asking them to search for and apprehend the bombers of the U.S. and French Marine barracks. Hizballah condemned the decision. The decision removed the protection of a civil war amnesty covering all acts of violence between 1975 and 1990.
On March 17, 2003, some 600 relatives of the U.S. servicemen killed in the bombing filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleging Iranian culpability. U.S. district judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that Iran could be sued because the Marines were on a peacekeeping mission under peacetime rules of engagement, not rules of combat. He cited a 1996 law that permits U.S. citizens to take legal action against state sponsors of terrorism. The judge had entered default judgments against Iran on December 18, 2002, because of its failure to respond to the lawsuit. On May 30, 2003, Judge Lamberth ruled that Iran was behind the bombing, thereby permitting the relatives to collect damages against Iran. Lamberth said a court-appointed master would consider the financial claims. On September 7, 2007, Lambert ordered that Iran pay $2,656,944,877 to the circa 1,000 family members and survivors, specifying individual awards down to the dollar. The largest award of $12 million went to Larry Gerlach, who sustained a broken neck and became a permanent quadriplegic. As of late 2013, payment has yet to be made.
Overview: Sikh militants generally confined their operations to the region of conflict between India and Pakistan. Seeking revenge for the Indian army’s storming of the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 in which hundreds died, some Sikhs in Canada expanded their operations to conduct a high-profile airliner bombing campaign that presaged the al Qaeda simultaneous mass-casualty, multiple-target attack template.
Incident: On June 23, 1985, Air India flight 182, en route from Toronto to Bombay with intermediate stops in Montreal, London, and New Delhi, disappeared from Shannon Airport radar at 31,000 feet altitude, 90 miles from the Irish coast. The B-747 carried 329 people, including 4 infants and 77 children. Passengers included 279 Canadians and 7 Americans; most of the rest were Indian. Four helicopters of the Royal Air Force searched for survivors and debris. Everyone had perished in the worst airplane crash over water and the third worst in aviation history.
An hour earlier, a bomb placed in a suitcase aboard Canadian Pacific Airlines flight 003, en route from Vancouver to Tokyo with 374 passengers and 16 crew, exploded after being unloaded at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. The suitcase was in a baggage container waiting to be loaded onto Air India flight 301 to Bombay. Baggage handlers Hideo Asano and Hideharu Koda were killed when the bomb prematurely exploded in the baggage area of Narita Airport; four other airport employees were injured. The baggage aboard the Canadian Pacific flight had not been given X-ray surveillance for explosives. Authorities at the Toronto airport confirmed that the surveillance equipment was malfunctioning on June 23, 1985, and that many pieces of luggage placed aboard flight 182 had not been screened for explosives.
In two anonymous phone calls to the New York Times, self-proclaimed spokesmen took credit for the Air India crash on behalf of two Sikh separatist groups—the Sikh Student Federation and the Kashmir Liberation Front. In a call to the Canadian Broadcasting Company, a selfproclaimed spokesman claimed credit on behalf of a third extreme Sikh group.
India conducted the investigation into the crash. Experts from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada assisted. Evidence included 50 video films of the aircraft wreckage, the results of autopsies performed on the bodies, 4,000 photographs, the cockpit voice recorder, the digital flight data recorder, and recovered pieces of the wreckage. The overwhelming evidence pointed to a mid-air bomb blast:
On November 21, 1985, India’s director of air safety, H. S. Khola, issued a report that concluded that a bomb had caused the crash. On February 26, 1986, a judicial inquiry in New Delhi concluded that a suitcase planted by a terrorist caused the explosion. The 212-page report submitted to the Indian Civil Aviation Ministry indicated that a bomb had been placed aboard the ill-fated plane’s forward luggage compartment in Toronto. The report accused two Sikh extremists—Lal Singh and Annand Singh—of having placed the bomb on board. The Singh brothers had booked tickets on flight 182. Even though they had checked luggage on the flight for Bombay, neither of them boarded the flight. The report also implicated the brothers in the explosion at the Tokyo Airport. On June 20, 1985, the brothers booked tickets on the Canadian Pacific Airlines flight 003 to Tokyo. In Tokyo, they were scheduled to transfer to Air India flight 301, the flight for which the suitcase bomb had been intended. At Vancouver, a man named A. Singh checked in one or more bags for flight 003, which were to be transferred to Air India flight 301 in Tokyo. Neither L. Singh nor A. Singh boarded flight 003.
The Singh brothers had attended a mercenary training camp in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early part of 1985. They had told the camp director, Frank Camper, that they were preparing an “offensive” that summer. In the training camp, they were taught the use of weapons and explosives. Investigators believed that a time bomb had been used in each incident. The bomb at the Tokyo Airport had exploded prematurely, causing the death of the two baggage handlers.
Lal Singh and Annand Singh were also wanted for a plot to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi during his scheduled visit in June 1985. As of November 1988, the Singh brothers were at large.
Prosecutors said Sikh militants built the bomb in British Columbia.
On June 10, 1991, Justice Raymond Paris of Canada’s British Columbia Supreme Court sentenced to 10 years in prison Inderjit Singh Reyat, 39, a Canadian Sikh who was convicted on May 10, 1991, on two counts of manslaughter and four explosives offenses for making a bomb that exploded at the Tokyo airport. Justice Paris said that the former auto electrician at the very least helped others build a suitcase bomb that was to have been used to blow up an Indian airliner. Reyat was the only person charged with the blast. He was a devout Sikh who aided members of the militant Babbar Khalsa, a Sikh nationalist organization. On February 10, 2003, Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the Air India 182 case. He was sentenced to five years for helping acquire the materials used to make the bomb. Prosecutors said he did not know who made the bomb and thought the material would be used for bombs in India. The surprise plea came less than two months before he and two other men were to stand trial on murder charges in the case.
On October 27, 2000, Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in Vancouver arrested Ripudaman Singh Malik, a millionaire who ran a Vancouver radio station, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, a sawmill worker from Kamloops, British Columbia. They faced eight charges, including first-degree murder, conspiracy, and attempted murder in the killing of the 329 people on the Air India flight 182 bombing. They were also charged with the attempted murder of the passengers and crew in the Tokyo explosion. On April 28, 2003, their trial began. On March 16, 2005, British Columbia Supreme Court justice Ian Josephson acquitted Malik and Bagri of murder and other charges in the Air India 182 case and of the bombing in Tokyo. The judge said key witnesses were not credible.
Overview: A dizzying blizzard of Palestinian terrorist groups jockeyed for position in the 1970s and 1980s to gain leadership of the Palestinian struggle against Israel and its allies. Groups conducted campaigns of bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and barricade-and-hostage operations against primarily European targets throughout Europe and the Middle East. The Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) garnered extensive publicity with its shipjacking and brutal murder of a wheelchair-bound American, whose body they threw off the ship. Post-incident handling of the case strained U.S.–Egyptian relations and led to the resignation of the Italian government. The search for the Abu Abbas–led group took years, but eventually the perpetrators were rendered to justice.
Incident: On October 3, 1985, the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro set sail from Genoa, Italy, carrying 754 passengers and 331 crew. As scheduled, the ship made calls at Naples and Syracuse. When it docked in Alexandria, 634 passengers disembarked for an overland trip to the Pyramids with plans to reboard the ship at Port Said. Thirty miles from the next port-of-call, on October 7, 1985, four terrorists armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, eight grenades, and other weapons seized the ship. The takeover took place at 1:00 p .m. when the terrorists fired warning shots in the main dining room. Two hostages were slightly injured by gunfire during the initial takeover. The hijackers held 331 crew and 116 passengers hostage, including 12 Americans. The terrorists collected the passengers’ passports and grouped people according to nationalities. The Americans were ordered onto the top deck, where for four grueling hours of heat, they were not given water. Hostages included people from West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, and the Netherlands. The hijackers ordered Capt. Gerardo de Rosa to head to Syria. On the morning of October 8, 1985, the ship was off the coast of Tartus, Syria. By radio, the hijackers, who identified themselves as members of the PLF, requested permission to dock. Syria denied the request. The hijackers demanded the release of 50 Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel. At 2:42 p .m ., one hijacker radioed Syrian authorities, saying “We have no more time. We will start executing at 3:00 p.m. sharp.” At 2:55 p .m., they warned, “We have five minutes only.” The hijackers singled out Leon Klinghoffer, 69, an American confined to a wheelchair. Klinghoffer was shot in the head and chest. The hijackers then ordered two of the hostages to dump Klinghoffer in his wheelchair overboard.
Israel responded to the hijackers’ demands by reiterating its policy of not conceding to terrorists. The United States announced that the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier, and the USS Scott, a guided-missile destroyer, were steaming to the vicinity of the Achille Lauro. The Delta Force was also dispatched to the region.
Israel believed that the four hijackers—Bassam Ashqar, 17; Majid Yusuf al-Mulki, 23; Mar’uf Ahmad al-As’adi, 23; and ‘Abdal-Latif Ibrahim Fatayer, 20—had been sent by Mohammad Abbas Zaidan (Abu Khalid) on a suicide mission to Ashdod, Israel. In an interview with CBS Radio after the incident ended, Abbas confirmed that the terrorists were, indeed, en route to a suicide mission inside Israel when the boat hijacking occurred.
When Syria refused their request to dock, the hijackers ordered the captain to head back toward Port Said. On October 9, 1985, the ship was 12 miles off the coast of Port Said. During the early afternoon, the terrorists communicated with Egyptian officials by ship-to-shore radio. Egyptian defense minister Mohammad Abu Ghazala headed the negotiations. Two Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representatives—Hani Hassan and Zahdi Qoudra—in Cairo assisted with the negotiations. The PLF interests were represented in Cairo by Abbas. At 4:20 P.M., the negotiators agreed in principle on a deal with the hijackers, where by the hostages would be freed in exchange for safe passage to Tunis for the hijackers. The incident ended at 5:00 P.M. when Abbas and Egyptian authorities took a small boat to the ship and boarded it.
The United States immediately requested that Egypt turn the hijackers over to them to face trial.
On the morning of October 10, 1985, Egyptian president Mubarak announced that the hijackers had already departed Egypt.
The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence sources used electronic eavesdropping devices to establish that the terrorists were still in Egypt. At 7:00 p.m., the USS Saratoga, off the coast of Albania, turned around, and seven F-14 fighter jets took off, supported by E2C Hawkeye electronic surveillance planes. At 9:15 P.M., a chartered Egyptair B-737 left Cairo with Abbas, Hani Hasan, and the four hijackers. The surveillance planes intercepted the B-737, which had been refused permission to land in Tunis and Athens. The F-14s flashed their lights to convince the Egyptair pilot that he was surrounded. The F-14s ordered the B-737 to follow them to Sigonella, a U.S.–Italian air base in Sicily. U.S. commandos, Italian soldiers, and police took the four hijackers and two Palestinian officials into custody. Seventeen Egyptian passengers were also on the plane.
The four hijackers were arrested by Italian authorities, but the two Palestinian officials were only detained for questioning. On October 12, 1985, Abbas and Hasan boarded the Egyptair B-737 and took off from Ciampino Airport to Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. At 7:10 P.M., the two boarded a Yugoslav JAT Airways jet for Belgrade and freedom. The United States protested the escape of Abbas, whom the United States wanted to charge with sea piracy. At the time of his release, the United States was preparing papers asking Italy to extradite Abbas and the four hijackers. U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese characterized Abbas as “an international criminal” and vowed that the United States would do everything possible to bring Abbas to justice.
A fifth Palestinian—Muhammad Isa Abbas, 25—was charged on October 14, 1985, with complicity in the hijacking. Abbas, a cousin of the Abbas who masterminded the operation, was arrested as he disembarked from a ship from Tunis on September 28, 1985, five days before the departure of the Achille Lauro. A sixth Palestinian, who departed the Achille Lauro in Alexandria, was also being sought.
On October 16, 1985, the Israeli government released a partial transcript of a ship-to-shore telephone conversation between the hijackers and Abbas. The transcript clearly indicated that Abbas had been in control of the terrorists during the hijacking.
On October 17, 1985, Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi announced the resignation of his cabinet in the wake of the government’s handling of Abbas.
On October 23, 1985, hijacker Mur’uf Ahmad al-As’adi turned state’s evidence. As’adi identified Abbas as having masterminded their mission. Majid Yusuf al-Molqi was identified as the head of the terrorist squad and as the one who murdered Klinghoffer.
On October 26, 1985, Italian authorities revealed that a sixth suspect— Yusef Ali Yuseb Ismail—had been arrested.
On November 3, 1985, Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA) wire service revealed that a senior aide to PLF leader Abbas had been aboard the Achille Lauro. Abd al-Rahim Khalid traveled under a stolen Greek passport bearing the name Petros Flores. Khalid was believed to have left the ship at Alexandria.
On November 13, 1985, Italian authorities issued arrest warrants for 16 PLF members connected with the hijacking. Only seven were in custody— the four hijackers, Muhammad Isa Abbas, Yusuf Ali Ismail, and Ibrahim Husari. Arrest warrants were also issued for:
On November 18, 1985, the four hijackers and Mohammad Isa Abbas, who allegedly smuggled the Kalashnikov rifles into Italy, were tried on arms smuggling charges. All were found guilty. Isa Abbas was sentenced to nine years in prison, and Yusuf al-Molqi was sentenced to eight years. The others were sentenced to between four and five years.
On June 18, 1986, the murder and kidnapping trial opened in Genoa. Al-Molqi, As’adi, and Fatayer were in the courtroom, along with accused accomplices Isa Abbas and Mohammad Gandour, 37. Gandour had been arrested in Rome in early September 1985 for possession of fake documents. He was an alleged courier and financier for the hijackers. Ten others, including Abbas, were tried in absentia.
On July 10, 1986, the Italian court sentenced 11 men convicted in the trial. PLF leader Abbas was sentenced to life imprisonment. Al-Molqi was sentenced to 30 years. Izz al-Din Badra Khan and Ziyad al-Umar were sentenced to life. Fatayer was sentenced to 24 years. As’adi was sentenced to 15 years and 2 months. Isa Abbas received a six-month sentence for using a false passport. Gandour was sentenced to eight months and freed because he had already served the time awaiting trial.
On August 1, 1986, Yusuf Hisham al-Nisir was arrested in Viechtach, West Germany. Al-Nisir had been sentenced, in absentia, to six and a half years for providing weapons to the hijackers.
On December 6, 1986, Ashqar was found guilty of complicity in the murder of Klinghoffer and was sentenced to 16 years and 3 months by a juvenile court.
On May 19, 1989, Swedish police arrested a Palestinian believed to have been involved in the case.
On December 24, 1990, three weeks before the opening of the Allied air attacks on Iraq occupation forces in Kuwait, a Genoa magistrate freed Isa Abbas and Yusuf Ahmed Saad—who were jailed in the case—under an amnesty program. Their lawyers said that they were immediately expelled from Italy and apparently went to Algeria.
On March 5, 1991, Athens police arrested Khalid, 57, one of three masterminds of the attack, and three Greeks in the home of Petros Floros, a friend in central Athens, who had been acquitted in the Achille Lauro case. (Floros had been accused of giving Khalid his passport so that he could board the ship.) Police said that they had been planning to bomb a Barclays Bank branch; they found dynamite and a gasoline bomb on the premises of the house. Police also found drugs in Khalid’s home. A court in Genoa, Italy, had convicted Khalid in absentia in 1986 and sentenced him to seven and a half years in prison. After prosecution protests, in May 1987 a Genoa appeals court increased the sentence to life imprisonment. Rome requested extradition. On March 20, 1991, Athens police said that Khalid admitted to having planned the attack. On May 6, 1991, Khalid, using the name Mohammed Nouami, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug dealing.
On May 29, 1991, an Athens appeal council decided to extradite to Italy Khalid. He tried to escape from Koridhallos maximum security prison near Piraeus with 31 others on May 12, 1991, but was arrested.
On October 25, 1991, the Greek Supreme Court ruled in favor of Italy’s extradition request. Khalid was serving a 33-month sentence for trying to escape from Koryda prison.
On February 21, 1994, a Swedish court issued a warrant for the arrest of Samir Muhammad al-Qadir, an operations officer of the Abu Nidal group suspected of being the mastermind in the Achille Lauro case.
On January 26, 1995, Warsaw’s Gazeta Polska reported that the terrorists were armed with Kalashnikovs supplied by three Polish generals.
On April 13, 2003, U.S. Special Operations troops captured Abu Abbas in southern Baghdad. He died of natural causes on March 8, 2004, in U.S. custody in Iraq.
On July 7, 2008, Fatayer, 43, was ordered freed, having served his 25-year sentence (reduced for good behavior).
On April 30, 2009, al-Molqi was released early from a prison in Palermo, Italy. He had served nearly 24 years of his 30-year sentence.
Overview: Libyan leader Col. Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi supported numerous Palestinian and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups during his 40-plus year reign. Guns, money, safe haven, and other operational support were easily available to itinerant terrorists visiting Benghazi and Tripoli. Qadhafi’s efforts to expand his idiosyncratic ideology throughout the Middle East and Africa fell on deaf ears, but terrorist groups were willing to make appropriate statements of agreement in return for aid. Evidence of Libyan involvement in a direct attack against U.S. interests in Europe was more than the Reagan administration was willing to take. In the absence of stronger Western support against Libya, the bombing of La Belle Disco sparked an airstrike by the United States that quieted Qadhafi’s attacks, but for a short time only.
An attack on an airliner carrying Americans two years later showed that Qadhafi was not easily deterred from his dreams of rule by his Green Book. Increased sanctions against his support of the bombings of Western aircraft eventually led to his renunciation of terrorism and dismantling of his weapons of mass destruction programs. Qadhafi and his rule came to a violent end as part of the extended Arab Spring of 2011, in which numerous despotic regimes were overturned by popular uprisings.
Incident: On April 4, 1986, at 1:45 A.M., a 4.5-pound bomb placed near the dance floor destroyed La Belle Discotheque located in Friedenau in the West Berlin’s Schoeneberg district. At the time of the explosion, about 500 people packed the discotheque. The blast blew a hole through the ceiling and the cellar below, and destroyed the walls. A female survivor recalled, “The lights suddenly went out and then a deafening explosion, and the ceiling and all these cables came down on my head and I thought, ‘Oh, God, now I die.’ There was blood all over, legs sticking out of the debris and people were walking on my head.” The blast killed three people—Sgt. Kenneth Terrance Ford, 21; Nermine Haney, 28; and S. Sgt. James E. Goins, 26. The 231 wounded included 62 Americans, plus West Germans, Turks, and Arabs. Ford and Goins were U.S. servicemen; Haney was a Turkish woman.
On April 5, 1986, three groups claimed credit. One was the hitherto unknown Anti-American Liberation Front. The other two were the Holger Meins Commando, an offshoot of the Red Army Faction (RAF), and the RAF.
On April 7, 1986, Richard Burt, the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, told the Today show, “There is very clear evidence that there is Libyan involvement.” Burt said that the evidence was “hard” that the perpetrator operated out of the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin.
On April 8, 1986, the United States gave decoded messages between Libya and its East Berlin embassy to the West German government. Prior to the attack, the intercepted messages appeared to indicate that an operation was planned. Following the attack, a message was received that appeared to offer praise for a job well done.
On April 8, 1986, the Bild Zeitung reported that a Libyan diplomat posted in East Berlin, Al-Amin ‘Abdullah al-Amin, was suspected by West German police as having organized the bombing.
President Ronald Reagan said in an April 9, 1986, news conference that the United States was prepared to retaliate militarily if there was proof linking Libya to the discotheque bombing.
On April 11, 1986, U.S. officials told of a warning of an attack against U.S. servicemen in West Berlin. The officials said that the so-called warning came too late to alert military personnel.
On April 12, 1986, the United States, Britain, and France agreed to ban suspected terrorists from entering West Berlin from the east. A series of security measures were installed.
On April 14, 1986, U.S. war planes left air bases in Britain to launch retaliatory strikes against targets in Libya. The raid started on April 15, 1986, at 2:00 A.M. local time. U.S. government officials cited the La Belle bombing as motivating the strikes.
On April 20, 1986, West German police arrested Ahmed Nawaf Mansour Hasi, 35, as a suspect. Evidence gathered from the London-based investigation into the April 17, 1986, attempted bombing of an El Al plane by Nezar Hindawi led to the arrest of Hasi, the brother of Hindawi. During a police lineup, “about a hundred witnesses” present at the La Belle bombing identified Hasi as being at the discotheque, according to newspaper reports. During interrogation, Hasi admitted responsibility for the March 29, 1986, bombing of the Arab–German Friendship Society but denied any involvement in the La Belle bombing. Hasi’s confession led to the arrest of two alleged accomplices—Farouk Salameh and Fayez Sahawneh—for the March 29, 1986, bombing. Hasi and Salameh were found guilty of the March 29, 1986, bombing but were never charged in the La Belle bombing.
On August 27, 1986, Italian police arrested Jordanian citizen Gassan Belbeasi, 25, on suspicion that he belonged to an international terrorist group linked to the Berlin bombing. Belbeasi, a student at the medical school of the University of Genoa, was questioned. His two roommates were also arrested and questioned.
On January 18, 1987, the Berliner Morgenpost reported that a letter found on Awni Hindawi, a cousin of Nezar Hindawi, suggested a link between Nezar Hindawi and Syrian contacts in the discotheque bombing.
On January 11, 1988, authorities arrested Kristine Endrigkeit in Lubeck, West Germany. She was charged with planting the bomb in La Belle Discotheque. According to authorities, she was following the orders of Hasi and Hindawi.
On April 19, 1993, the trial opened at the Twenty-Ninth Grand Criminal Bench of the Berlin Region Court, where Imad Mugniyah, 37, pleaded not guilty to charges of planning attacks on members of the U.S. military. The stateless Palestinian said that he would probably rely upon his right to remain silent in the case. He had been in custody since November 16, 1992. Prosecution lawyers accused Mugniyah of planning attacks on a U.S. military bus and on an unspecified bar frequented by U.S. soldiers in West Berlin in March 1986. Members of the Libyan People’s Bureau (embassy) in East Berlin delivered weapons to his flat in West Berlin. Threats from Libya against the United States resulted in the police tightening controls and caused the would-be attackers to drop their plans. Instead, they set off an incendiary in La Belle.
In August 1993, German federal authorities began trying to obtain the extradition of stateless Palestinian Yusef Shuraydi, who was arrested in Lebanon, on charges of being involved in La Belle Disco attack. In 1986, he was a diplomat at the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin. In 1992, he was detained in Lebanon pending extradition.
On January 12, 1994, Beirut’s al-Diyar identified him as Yasir al-Shuraydi (variant Shuraydi), a Palestinian being held in Tyre prison on charges of attempted murder and forgery. He could face other charges in seven pending cases. Several charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. He was due to face public trial later that month. The paper noted:
In 1983, when al-Shuraydi lived in Libya, Germany called on that country to extradite him. He was later implicated in the murder of a Libyan citizen called Mustafa al-’Ashiq. Al-Shuraydi, born in 1959 and a resident of ‘Ayn al-Hulwah camp, hails from the al-Safsaf, a village in northern Palestine.
On June 21, 1994, a Sidon, Lebanon tribunal acquitted Shuraydi on charges of murdering a Libyan dissident in West Berlin in 1984. The chief witness recanted testimony.
On August 2, 1994, Lebanese authorities released Shuraydi to the consternation of the Germans, who claimed the Americans were slow in providing material crucial to the extradition request. The Washington Post reported that Stasi documents indicated that he had told a Lebanese court that he began working in 1984 as a driver in the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau, which provided him with a Libyan passport for the alias Yussef Salam. German officials believed he was tied to Abu Nidal and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Stasi files noted that a planning meeting was held on March 26, 1986, in a Vienna Street apartment in West Berlin’s Kreuzberg section.
Shuraydi was extradited from Lebanon to Germany on May 23, 1996, after Bonn agreed not to send him for trial to the United States or Turkey, where he faced the death penalty.
On June 17, 1996, former East German Stasi Lt. Col. Rainer Wiegand, the star witness against Shuraydi, died in a head-on collision with a meat truck in Portugal. Police suspected foul play.
On January 8, 1997, Greece said it would extradite Andrea Hausler, 31, in connection with the bombing. She was arrested in October 1996 at the request of German authorities while she was vacationing in the Chalkidiki resort near Thessaloniki. Justice Minister Evanghelos Yanopou-los signed the extradition order on January 7, 1997.
On February 7, 1997, state prosecutor Dieter Neumann accused the Libyan intelligence service of having instigated the bombing. Five people, including a Libyan, were indicted.
On August 25, 1997, Italian police arrested Musbah Abulgasem Eter, 40, a Libyan wanted in Germany and believed to be the only remaining fugitive with a direct role in the bombing. He had shown up at the German Embassy in Malta in 1995, offering to blame everything on Libya. He claimed he had seen cables between the Libyan People’s Bureau and Said Rashid, the head of Libyan intelligence, who had also been tied to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. Eter claimed Rashid ordered the bombing after U.S. planes sank two Libyan patrol boats in the Gulf of Sirte in March 1986. Eter said Shuraydi was the mastermind. Eter later flew to Libya unmolested. He flew to Berlin to await trial but ran off again. He was arrested in Rome at a hotel across from the Libyan Embassy, where he was found with a suitcase full of cash.
Shuraydi denied prosecution claims that he had been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP-GC) since 1976. They said he had assassinated a Libyan exile in Berlin in 1984.
On November 18, 1997, Eter, two other Libyan Embassy employees, and two German sisters went on trial. The embassy employees were Ali Chanaa, 39, a German citizen of Lebanese origin, and Shuraydi, 39. The two German sisters were Ali’s ex-wife Verena, 39, and Hausler. The charge sheet said Verena, accompanied by her sometime-prostitute sister, carried the bomb in her purse and planted it at the edge of the dance floor. They left five minutes before the explosion. Shuraydi and the Chanaas were charged with three counts of murder, nine counts of attempted murder, and causing a fatal blast. Eter and Hausler were charged as accessories. Everyone faced life in prison.
The Chanaas were apparently Stasi informants. Verena had been convicted of spying by a Berlin court in 1993. She had received 6,000 marks for carrying the bomb; Ali received 9,000 marks. Prosecutors said Shuraydi and Ali made the bomb; Eter passed the Libyan Embassy’s money to them.
On December 2, 1997, Eter recanted his confession implicating the other defendants and Libya.
On November 13, 2001, German judge Peter Marhofer convicted and sentenced four defendants to 12–14 years for the bombing. He ruled that charges that Qadhafi ordered the bombing personally were not proven. Libya refused to extradite five other suspects.
Verena Chanaa was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 14 years. Hausler was acquitted. Shuraydi was convicted of multiple counts of attempted murder and sentenced to 14 years.
On August 10, 2004, Libya agreed to pay $35 million in compensation to 170 of the non-U.S. victims, including Germans who were wounded, and to the family of a Turkish woman who was killed. Libya refused to accept guilt, saying it was a “humanitarian gesture.”
Overview: Terrorist hijackers from this era generally used their hostages for negotiations, at times killing one or more to establish their commitment to their negotiation position but with an eye to getting out of the situation alive and with some or all of their demands met. The Pan Am 73 incident was a rare case in which the terrorists turned their guns and grenades on the passengers before institution of a rescue operation by the authorities. Fatah renegade Abu Nidal’s organization, using cover names such as Black June, often reached new levels of ferocity in their attacks and at times turned on their own members. Court testimony of the hijackers presaged the 9/11 use of airplanes as weapons; the terrorists had planned to explode the plane, with themselves in it, over Israel.
Incident: On September 5, 1986, the Libyan Revolutionary Cells and the Organization of the Soldiers of God–Martyr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Group separately claimed credit when four gunmen took over Pan Am flight 73 (Clipper Empress of the Seas), a B-747 that had just loaded passengers at Karachi, Pakistan, airport at 5:55 A.M. The plane was to fly from Bombay to New York via Karachi and Frankfurt. The hijackers stormed aboard dressed in security guard uniforms, killing American crew member Rajesh Kumar and injuring two Pakistani baggage handlers. Kumar had objected to the terrorists’ rough handling of the flight attendants. The hijackers shot him in the back of the head and threw him out of the plane. The three chief American crew members escaped out a hatch in the pilots’ compartment, there by grounding the plane with 399 people, including 44 Americans, 16 Italians, 15 Britons, 12 West Germans, 84 Pakistanis, 195 Indians, and 16 crew.
The director general of Pakistan’s civil aviation department established contact with the hijackers, who demanded to be flown to Larnaca where they wished to secure the release of their friends in Cyprus— Briton Ian Davison, 27; Syrian Khalid ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Khatib, 28; and Jordanian ‘Abdal-Hakim Sa’du al-Khalifah, 29, who were convicted of the massacre on September 25, 1985, of three Israelis on a yacht at Larnaca marina in Cyprus. The group threatened to kill one of the 399 on the plane every 10 minutes if their demands that the cockpit crew return were not met by 7:00 P.M. Air marshal Khurshid Anwar Mirza won an extension of the deadline of several hours at 6:30 P.M. when he promised that a new Pan Am crew was en route. The group also demanded the release from Cyprus of Amin Sulayman Za’rur, 25, from Lebanon, who was arrested on August 14, 1986, 10 days after the rocket and mortar attack on the U.K. base at Akrotiri, in which two servicemen’s wives were slightly injured.
Cyprus and Iran refused to allow the plane to overfly their air space or to land.
The group was unable to find any American passports among those collected by the flight attendants—they had hidden the U.S. passports— but the hijackers selected that of a British school teacher from London, Michael John Thexton, 27, who they forced to come forward and stay with them for the next 14 hours.
One of the hijackers, who went around barechested and called himself Rambo, identified himself as Zeba Hamid and claimed that it was his birthday. Another hijacker forced passengers to walk to the bathroom on their knees.
As the hostage siege moved into evening, 16 hours after it began, the airplane’s lights began to dim as main and auxiliary generators began to run out of power. Thinking that the Pakistanis might be planning a rescue raid, the hijackers herded all of the passengers into the front compartment at 9:20 P.M. A few minutes later, Zayd Hassan Abd al-Latif Masud al-Safarini (at first only known as Mustafa and later as Mohbar Hussain), the hijackers’ leader, yelled, “Are you ready for the final episode? Prepare yourself! Jihad!” The hijackers then threw their grenades and fired two clips of ammunition into the hostages, killing 22 and injuring 100 others. An American passenger pushed a terrified flight attendant out of the way and opened one of the emergency doors. The passengers scrambled out of the plane.
Safarini, who had explosives strapped to his body, ordered one of his compatriots to shoot him in the stomach to set off the explosives and kill everyone else on board. His colleague missed, winging him, and then fled. Pakistani security forces arrested the four hijackers. Alessandra Bettolo, a student from Italy, and her friend from Milan, Michele Colombo, 21, pointed out a hijacker who was trying to escape by posing as a passenger. Passengers attacked the hijacker, but the police rescued and arrested him.
Pakistan claimed that it had sent a rescue squad, but some passengers disputed the claim. On September 14, 1986, the Washington Post reported that Pakistani snipers may have sparked the bloodbath by attempting to shoot the hijackers’ leader through the cockpit windows, which the bullets could not pierce.
Twenty-five ambulances sped toward the plane, narrowly missing running over escaping passengers. Two of the ambulances carrying wounded passengers collided on the main road, injuring both drivers.
Autopsies determined that 10 passengers died from gunfire, 7 from grenade shrapnel, and 4 from injuries suffered as they leaped from the wing of the plane. Among those killed were 3 Americans, 13 Indians, 2 Pakistanis, a Mexican, and an unidentified child. The injured included Americans, an Indian, a West German, a Briton, an Australian, and an Italian.
Police arrested 100 Arabs residing in Pakistan for questioning.
Three of the hijackers were held at the Malir Army Base 4 miles from the Karachi airport. A fourth gunman unsuccessfully attempted to escape from the hospital.
The hijackers claimed after being arrested that they belonged to the International Revolutionary Organization. Safarini said he was a Palestinian and that two of the attackers were a Lebanese and a Syrian. A man with falsified Bahraini passport 250257 was also interrogated. Each hijacker gave six different names. Police learned that the hijackers purchased a Suzuki van in Karachi and were searching for its renter, a man named Joseph who met with Safarini several times. They had stayed in Karachi’s Taj Mahal Hotel, where they paid for 19 days accommodation and had security uniforms tailored locally. President Zia ul-Haq said that three of the hijackers were 19, 23, and 25 years of age.
On September 8, 1986, the hijackers were charged with hijacking, murder, attempted murder, and several other crimes. They were identified in court as Bomar Hussein (Mustafa), Abdullah Khalil, Nasir Husain, and Fahad. All carried Bahraini passports.
On September 10, 1986, police arrested Wadoud Muhammad Hafiz alTurki (known at the time as Salman Tariki or Sulman Taraqi), who had a valid Libyan passport with a visa obtained at the request of the Libyan People’s Bureau and held a job with a maritime company that had offices in Tripoli. Hong Kong AFP reported that a companion of Turki fled into the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Islamabad, but a PLO spokesman denied that his group was involved. (On September 13, 1986, PLO leader Yasir Arafat offered to help track down the attackers. Pakistan declined his offer.) Turki had been in Pakistan for six weeks, arriving from Larnaca, Cyprus, where the gunmen had demanded to be taken. Pakistan said that Turki had masterminded the assault by the four Palestinians, who grew up in the Lebanese refugee camps. The four traveled to Pakistan separately after arriving in the country two weeks before the hijacking. Turki and the leader arranged for weapons and cased the airport. Turki led the authorities to a cache of East European weapons on the coast near Karachi that had not been used.
The Civil Aviation Authority in Karachi reported on September 11, 1986, that threats had been made to hijack a Pakistan International Airlines jet to obtain the release of the four detained terrorists. On October 1, 1986, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency detained Yahya Abdus Salam, a Libyan commercial pilot trainee, who was suspected of being an associate of Turki.
Abu Nidal sent a message to Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq, denying that his group was involved.
On January 5, 1988, during their trial in a courtroom at Adiyala prison, the five accused hijackers (Safarini, Turki, Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, Muhammad Abdullah Khalil Hussain ar-Rahayyal, and Muhammad Ahmad al-Munawor) admitted taking over the plane with the intention of blowing it up over Israel after securing the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. However, they claimed that Pakistani commandos were responsible for the deaths of those on board and said that they had intended to release the passengers. In a statement read by the Pakistani defense counsel the group said:
We came to Pakistan to hijack an American airplane to instantly draw the whole world’s attention towards Palestine. Our aim was to hijack the plane, free all the hostages, and take the plane to various countries to get the release of 1,500 Palestinian freedom fighters. Our aim was to fly the plane toward some sensitive strategy center of the Zionist enemy and to blow it up with us inside. . . . We wanted to destroy the sensitive strategic center of the Zionists through an American weapon—the explosion of the American plane. By this we would have struck at American imperialism. We wanted to strike at both enemies with one weapon at one time.
They claimed that they became frustrated by alleged delaying tactics of the Pakistani commandos, who “attacked the airplane without caring for the lives of the innocent passengers on board except the Americans. It was done only to please America, although many innocent passengers . . . were killed.” They claimed they chose the Pakistani location:
due to the policies of the present regime, which maintains close relations with the great Satan, America . . . pro-American policies of this regime are detrimental not only to the Pakistani nation but to the Palestinian nation so. . . . All the Arab and Moslem governments maintain that they support the cause of Palestine. . . . In fact they support American imperialism and Israel. They declare they are friends of Palestine but the fact is that the jails of many Arab and Moslem countries are full of Palestinian prisoners.
On September 28, 2001, Abu Nidal member Safarini was arrested after his release from a Pakistani prison where he had served 14 years for hijacking the plane. The Kuwaiti-born Safarini shot U.S. passenger Rajesh N. Kumar in the head. President George Bush announced on October 1, 2001, that he had been brought into Alaska and that he would be charged with murder. Safarini was arraigned in U.S. District Court on charges contained in a 126-count indictment issued in 1991. His trial began in federal court in Washington, D.C., in September 2001; he was accused of being the ringleader who ordered the other gunmen to shoot the passengers and throw grenades at them. Prosecutors sought the death penalty. On November 12, 2003, he pleaded guilty to the charges to avoid the death penalty. U.S. district judge Emmet G. Sullivan announced on December 16, 2003, that Safarini, 41, would be sentenced to life after Safarini pleaded guilty to 95 counts of murder, air piracy, and terrorism. On May 13, 2004, Safarini was given three consecutive life sentences plus 25 years. The judge recommended he be sent to a super-maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, which also houses Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.
On January 9, 2010, Rahim, a Palestinian member of Abu Nidal with suspected al Qaeda ties, was killed in an air strike in North Waziristan, Pakistan. He had been tried and convicted in Pakistan in the Pan Am 73 attack, but he and three accomplices were freed in January 2008. The four made the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) Most Wanted Terrorist List in 2009.
Overview: The midair explosion of Pan Am 103 sparked one of the most puzzling whodunits in modern terrorism investigations. Initial theories looked at Iranian-sponsored Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine— General Command (PFLP-GC) terrorists out for revenge for the shootdown of an Iranian civil airliner in July 1988 by the USS Vincennes. Further investigation, however, pointed to two Libyans who worked at the behest of Qadhafi’s intelligence service. The United States eventually decided that Libyan perfidy was once again at play, and Tripoli had earned its inclusion on the list of patron state sponsors of terrorism.
Incident: On December 21, 1988, a pressure-sensitive time bomb exploded on Pan Am flight 103 as it was flying from London to New York. The B-747 crashed into the Scotland town of Lockerbie, 15 miles north of the English border, killing all 258 on board plus 15 people in the town. Another 12 seriously burned villagers were hospitalized. The plane had left London’s Heathrow Airport at 6:25 P.M. It disappeared from radar contact at 7:15 P.M. when it was cruising at 31,000 feet.
Investigators initially believed that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the PFLP-GC were responsible for the attack. The Guardians of the Islamic Revolution claimed credit, saying it was retaliating for the downing in July of an Iranian airliner by a U.S. warship in which 290 people died. A spokesman for the IRGC also claimed credit, although Iran denied responsibility. Fadl Shrourou, chief spokesman for Ahmed Jibril, leader of PFLP-GC, denied responsibility, although some observers noted that 13 members of the group had been arrested in Frankfurt on October 27, 1988.
U.K. and U.S. investigators examined the theory that the bomb was unwittingly taken on board by Khalid Jaafer, 21, a U.S. citizen of Lebanese Shia origins, who was returning to Michigan after a visit to Lebanon and Frankfurt. They thought he may have carried the brown Samsonite bag containing the bomb, believing it contained heroin. He traveled from Beirut to Germany, where he stayed with a Lebanese friend who had a relative in Hizballah.
On December 21, 1989, Muhammad Abu Talib was sentenced by the Uppsala, Sweden, town court to life imprisonment for attempted murder and gross destruction dangerous to the public for setting off two bombs in Copenhagen in July 1985 against the synagogue and against the Northwest Orient Airlines office, in which one person was killed and several others injured. Talib was also suspected by British police of participating in the Lockerbie bombing. Believed to be a member of PFLP-GC, Talib was one of 14 Arabs arrested on October 26, 1988, in Neuss, West Germany, where police found a weapons cache. The cache included altitude-sensitive detonators and three bombs built into Toshiba Bombeat 453 radio-cassette recorders. The Lockerbie bomb fragments exactly matched these components.
A fragment of the detonator found in the Scottish countryside differed from the Neuss cache. The Pan Am 103 detonator lacked an altimeter and had only a timer. This type of detonator matched timers seized from two Libyan intelligence agents arrested in Dakar, Senegal, in February 1988 on an Air Afrique flight en route to the Ivory Coast.
Bits of clothing in the suitcase in which the bomb exploded were traced to a clothing shop in Malta, a hangout for Libyans. The shopkeeper recalled selling it in November 1988 to a man with a Libyan accent. Investigators suspected the suitcase was sent to Frankfurt via Air Malta flight 180, then transferred unaccompanied to Pan Am 103.
On June 26, 1991, French authorities announced evidence that senior Libyan officials, including Abdullah Senoussi, Qadhafi’s brother-in-law and de facto chief of Libyan intelligence, and Moussa Koussa, vice minister of foreign affairs, were involved in the September 1989 French UTA bombing and the bombing of Pan Am 103.
On November 14, 1991, a federal grand jury in Washington issued 193 felony counts against Libyan intelligence officers Abdel Basset Ali alMegrahi, 39, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, 35. They were accused of planting and detonating the bomb and were believed to be in Libya. The U.S. indictment included 189 counts for killing the 189 U.S. citizens. It also included one count of conspiracy, one count of putting a destructive device on a U.S. civil aircraft resulting in death, one count of destroying a U.S. civil aircraft with an explosive device, and one count of destroying a vehicle in foreign commerce. The United Kingdom issued similar arrest warrants.
Authorities said the evidence was built up after FBI agents and Scottish police combed 845 square miles of territory. One clue was part of the Toshiba’s circuit board. Another was part of a timing device traced to Meister and Bollier, a Zurich-based Swiss company that had sold it in a consignment of 20 prototypes made in 1985–1986 to a high-level Libyan intelligence official. Moreover, according to the State Department, the Pan Am 103 bomb had been activated by a sophisticated electronic timer, in contrast to the PFLP-GC bombs, which had altimeter switches and relatively crude timers.
On December 4, 1991, Libya’s new intelligence chief, Col. Yusuf al-Dabri, announced the detention of Megrahi and Fhimah. The United States and United Kingdom demanded their extradition, but Qadhafi declined.
On December 8, 1991, Libya announced that it would try the two men charged by U.S. and U.K. authorities and that it would deliver the death penalty if they were found guilty.
On December 29, 1991, the Washington Post cited a CNN report that a Libyan who defected to the United States could serve as a witness in the case, testifying that Fhimah fabricated the Air Malta luggage tags. He was in the Justice Department’s Witness Protection Program and was living under an assumed identity on the West Coast. The low-level defector, who did not have an intelligence affiliation, obtained Fhimah’s Malta diary. The December 15, 1988, diary entry said, “Take tags from Air Malta.” The defector had arrived in the United States several months earlier, but had left some family members in Libya. He could be eligible for up to $4 million in a federal reward system.
On January 14, 1992, Libya proposed that an international commission of legal experts decide whether the UN Security Council should rule on who was responsible for the UTA and Pan Am cases. Maj. Abdul Salaam Jalloud said that his government would abide by the decision of such a panel, although Libya questioned whether the United Nations had jurisdiction.
On January 20, 1992, the UN Security Council strengthened draft Resolution 731 urging Libya to surrender the six suspects wanted for the Pan Am and UTA bombings. The resolution, which passed unanimously on January 21, 1992, included a lead role for UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali and called for a “full and effective response” to requests for the suspects. Libya denounced the resolution as an infringement on its sovereignty.
On March 31, 1992, the UN Security Council imposed via Resolution 748 an air and arms embargo on Libya, which took effect on April 15, 1992, when Libya refused to hand over the duo. The sanctions were far milder than those in place against Iraq and permitted oil exports. Libya thus became the sixth country in UN history to be hit with sanctions, joining Rhodesia, South Africa, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Somalia.
On May 6, 1992, the Argentine interior ministry canceled the residence permit and Argentine passport granted to Syrian citizen Monzer al-Kassar, 46, accused narcoterrorist and weapons smuggler. He was also suspected of financing the Lockerbie bombing. Buenos Aires Clarin re ported that the Israeli secret service was following an “al-Kassar clue” regarding the March 17, 1992, bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. On June 3, 1992, officers of Spain’s general intelligence department arrested al-Kassar and two other men as they were deplaning at Madrid–Barajas airport as they arrived on a flight from Vienna.
On September 28, 1993, Lord Macaulay suggested that an international court be set up to deal with such cases. It would have judges from Libya, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, and it would be chaired by a judge from another country. The prosecution could be conducted by Scotland’s lord advocate and the U.S. attorney general.
On September 29, 1993, Libyan foreign minister Omar Muntasser told UN secretary general Boutros-Ghali that it would turn over the duo to Scotland.
On January 23, 1994, the London Observer reported that Edwin Bollier, who had changed his testimony on the timers, admitted receiving expenses from Libya to include his travel to and from Libya, hotel bills there, and telephone and fax expenses, as well as Lockerbie-related legal bills. He also hoped Libya would pick up the £1.2 million in lost business Mebo had suffered.
On March 23, 1995, the FBI announced a $4 million reward for the capture of the two Libyans and placed them on its Ten Most Wanted List.
On March 31, 1995, the UN Security Council extended the sanctions against Libya. U.S. UN ambassador Madeleine K. Albright urged other nations to join in an oil embargo. The council reviewed the sanctions every 120 days. No formal vote was taken on the automatic extension. On October 29, 1988, the UN Security Council, for the 20th time in seven years, extended the sanctions against Libya.
The United Nations and the Libyans eventually agreed to a trial to be hosted by the International Court of Justice in The Hague using Scottish law with a Scottish judge. On April 5, 1999, the Libyans handed over the duo to UN officials, who took them to Camp Zeist outside The Hague. Their arrival automatically suspended the sanctions against Libya. The two appeared in court the next day charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and violations of international aviation security laws. The trial opened on May 3, 2000.
On January 31, 2001, the court found Megrahi guilty of murder; he lost an appeal on March 14, 2002. Fhimah was acquitted and immediately returned to a hero’s welcome in Libya. The court said the Libyan government was involved in planning and carrying out the bombing. Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. The court cited the identification of the Swiss-made Mebo MST13 timer as a key piece of evidence linking the bomb to the Libyans. Testimony of a prosecution witness was deemed not credible enough to link Fhimah to the blast.
On August 15, 2003, Libya formally accepted responsibility and agreed to pay as much as $10 million to each victim’s family. The first $4 million would be paid upon lifting of UN sanctions, the next $4 million after the United States lifted sanctions, and the final money after the State Department removed Libya from the patron state list. On September 20, 2004, President Bush lifted the ban on commercial air service to Libya and released $1.3 billion in frozen Libyan assets. Libya was expected to use $1 billion of the money to compensate the families. On June 26, 2006, Libya announced that it was no longer legally bound to its agreement to make final payments of $2 million each to the families of the victims. Libya said that although it had recently been dropped from the State Department’s list of terrorism sponsors, the United States had until the end of 2004 to do so to and thereby trigger the final payment.
On December 19, 2003, Libya announced that it would abandon weapons of mass destruction, freeze its nuclear program, and permit international inspectors into the country.
On August 4, 2008, President Bush directed the State Department to settle the final lawsuits against Libya in the bombing. Libya would receive immunity from future proceedings once compensation was paid.
Megrahi, claiming to have three months to live from terminal prostate cancer, was permitted to return to Libya on August 20, 2009. He gave a media interview from his death bed in October 2011. The following month, U.S. State Department said it would make a formal request for extradition. Meghrahi died at his home in Tripoli, Libya, on May 20, 2012.
Overview: While the Pan Am 103 bombing received greater publicity in the United States, the Libyan hand was also seen behind the bombing of a French airline Union des Transports Aériens (UTA) plane from Chad that killed 171 people. Libya government officials eschewed responsibility, but Tripoli ultimately paid millions in compensation to the victims’ families.
Incident: On September 19, 1989, the Clandestine Chadian Resistance claimed credit for setting off a bomb in French UTA flight 772, a DC-10 flying from N’djamena to Paris, killing all 171 passengers and crew when it crashed in eastern Niger’s Tenere Desert.
Among the dead were 49 Congolese, 29 Chadians, and French passengers. All of the crew were French. There were eight children, including three infants, on board. The victims included seven Americans, including Bonnie Pugh, wife of Robert L. Pugh, U.S. ambassador to Chad. Mrs. Pugh was traveling to help plan the wedding of her daughter in October. Also on the plane was Margaret Schutzius, 23, a Peace Corps volunteer who had completed a two-year tour in Chad as an English teacher; Patrick Huff, 38, of Franklin Texas; Donald Warner, 25, of Terry, Montana, of Parker Drilling Company; and Mihai Ali Manestianu. Also on board were James Turlington, 48, of Bellville, Texas, and Mark Corder, 35, of Houston, who had worked for Esso and an Exxon subsidiary.
The dead included Dominique Mavoungou, managing director of Congo’s Housing Promotion and Management Company; his wife; child; and seven members of another family. Other victims were the leader of Congo’s theatrical troupe, Roca do Zulu; Jean-Pierre Klein of France; the daughter of Jean-Michel Bokamba Yangouma, secretary general of the Congolese Trade Union Confederation; and son of Norbert Dabira, secretary of the Central Committee of the ruling Congolese Labour Party. One of the Frenchmen, Jacques Renaudat, 53, had been alleged to be trafficking arms. Mahamat Soumahila, Chad’s minister for planning and cooperation, also died. Two British employees of Parker Drilling perished. The Capuchin Roman Catholic order announced in Lucerne that Monsignors Antoine Gervais Aeby, who heads the order in Switzerland, and Gabriel Balet, a Swiss bishop in Chad, were on the flight. Also dead was the brother of Renaud Denoix de Saint Marc, the French government’s secretary general.
Reports said 77 of the 155 passengers boarded the plane in Brazzaville.
The group sent a typewritten statement in French to a Western news agency in Beirut saying that the “struggle will continue until the total departure of colonial military troops from Africa.” Shia Muslim activists in Africa were suspected.
French authorities denigrated two telephoned claims by callers from the Islamic Jihad. One caller demanded the release of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, the Shi’ite cleric who was captured by Israel in 1989, in southern Lebanon. The caller accused the French government of sharing information on him with Israel.
The flight began in Brazzaville, Congo, and was flying to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Le Parisien and Liberation reported that 10 kilograms of Semtex plastic explosives were planted on the plane’s fuel tanks in Brazzaville.
On September 22, 1989, the French government denied reports that it had received warnings of the attack. On September 15, 1989, the Lebanese magazine Ash Shiraa had quoted pro-Iranian Islamic militants as accusing France of reneging on a May 1988 deal that led to the release of three French hostages in Lebanon. The group threatened to attack French interests in Africa.
On October 1, 1989, Hamburg’s Bild Am Sonntag claimed that Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qadhafi paid the killers and provided the Semtex-H to the PFLP-GC. Bild reported that Libyan diplomats provided cash to PFLP offices in France, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Romania for explosives, weapons, plane tickets, hotels, and expenses.
The paper said Qadhafi was getting back at the French for aiding the Chadians in their border skirmishes with Libya. Bild attributed the UTA and Lockerbie bombings to Palestinian engineer Muhamad al-’Umari (alias Abu Ibrahim), founder of the terrorist group 15 May in 1979. He was the first to develop an easily moldable explosive that cannot be identified by the X-ray instruments at airports and explodes in planes through self-ignition with the help of an altimeter.
The next day, Libreville’s Africa No. One cited Rene Lapautre, UTA’s managing director, as saying that the bomb was placed on the plane in Brazzaville in a sugar container in the front baggage compartment.
On October 6, 1989, Salah Khalaf (alias Abu Iyad), the PLO’s number two, told Le Journal Du Dimanche that Iranians were cooperating with the PFLP-GC, who had been involved in the bombing.
On October 31, 1989, Gabon’s Africa No. One reported that a Samsonite attaché case was discovered with a double depth lining with deposits of 150–300 grams of pentryl between the layers. The bomb had a simple quartz alarm clock for a detonator to automatically set off the explosion at 10,000 meters. The paper noted that the suitcase was the same as used in the February 1985 attack on the British Marks and Spencer store in Paris. The perpetrator, arrested a year later, was Habib Amal. While awaiting sentencing, he admitted to being a member of Abu Ibrahim’s group of Fatah dissidents, which was linked to Hizballah.
On August 25, 1990, Paris AFP reported that a trio of Congolese armed by Libyan diplomats placed the bomb. Le Point quoted investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere as concluding that the mastermind was a Libyan diplomat in Brazzaville, Abdallah al-Azrag. AFP added that one of the passengers, Apollinaire Mangatany, had taken explosives training in Libya. It was not clear whether he was one of the nine passengers who deplaned in Ndjamena. In January 1990, according to Le Point, Congelese police arrested Mangatany’s friend, Bernard Yanga, who had taken him to the Brazzaville airport. Yanga confessed, and provided the name of accomplice Jean-Bosco Ngalina, believed to have gone to Zaire. Yanga told French and Congolese authorities that Mangatany was to leave the plane in Chad, where the bomb was to explode on the tarmac, mimicking a 1984 attack.
On October 26, 1990, the Zairian paper Elima reported that Ngalina had been arrested two weeks earlier and held in the Kinshasa central prison of Makala on suspicion of masterminding the bombing. He fled to Zaire immediately after the bomb was planted on the plane. He was arrested after 12 investigators from Zaire, Paris, and Interpol finished their work. The paper reported that he had confessed to fabricating the bomb. Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a French examining magistrate, arrived in Kinshasa on October 25, 1990, to hear Ngalina’s case. Paris AFP reported that Ngalina was a native of Zaire’s Equateur Province, from which President Mobutu hailed.
On June 26, 1991, French authorities announced that it had evidence that senior Libyan officials, including Abdullah Senoussi, Qadhafi’s brother-in-law and de facto chief of Libyan intelligence, and Moussa Koussa, vice minister of foreign affairs, were involved in the UTA bombing and the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103. Attacks against U.S. and French targets were discussed at a meeting at Libyan intelligence headquarters in Tripoli in September 1988. L’Express cited the confessions of two terrorists who took part in the UTA bombing. Judge Bruguiere was near to issuing charges against the Libyans. The UTA bomb was reportedly brought into the Congo in a Libyan diplomatic pouch and delivered to the three Congolese by an official of the Libyan Embassy in Brazzaville. Mangatany brought it onto the plane. Fragments of the bomb led investigators to believe that it was one of five bought by the Libyans from terrorist bomb-maker Abu Ibrahim in the mid-1980s.
On October 30, 1991, Bruguiere issued arrest warrants for Senoussi; ‘Abdallah al-Azraq, Libya’s chief diplomat in Brazzaville who also led Libyan intelligence there; and Ibrahim Naeli and Musbah Arbas, two members of the Libyan intelligence service. Naeli left Brazzaville on the day of the bombing. All four were charged with violations of French law by conspiring to commit murder, destroying property with explosives, and taking part in a terrorist enterprise. Bruguiere also issued wanted notices for Koussa and ‘Abdessalam Zadma, No. 3 in the Libyan intelligence service and chief of Qadhafi’s bodyguards. The United States was also investigating a Libyan intelligence official named Mohammed Naydi, who at times used the name Naeli. (Naydi and another Libyan intelligence officer were arrested in February 1988 in Dakar, Senegal, but released four months later. They were carrying timers which matched the Pan Am timer. Clothing found in the bombedout suitcase was purchased in a Silema, Malta, clothing shop by one of Naydi’s lieutenants.)
On January 13, 1992, at Cotonou, Benin, police arrested French citizen Ahmed Bouzid in the UTA investigation.
Yanga showed up at the French Embassy in Kinshasa, Zaire, on March 18, 1992, saying that he was ready to help with inquiries. He had been arrested early in 1990, after which he had accused the Libyan chargé d’affaires in Brazzaville of giving him explosives, which were made into a parcel and then handed to a passenger later thought to have left the plane during a stop in Chad. Yanga named two Congolese as his accomplices. All three were members of an opposition party financed by Libya. Yanga later retracted his accusations against Abdallah Elazragh, the Libyan chargé. On the basis of his evidence and other findings, however, Bruguiere issued an international arrest warrant against four Libyans in October 1991.
On February 3, 1993, Congolese police arrested Mohamed Emali, managing director of the Congolese Arab Libyan Lumber Company, in a Brazzaville hotel. He was released on February 11, 1993, after interrogation by French and Congolese police.
On December 1, 1994, French authorities detained Libyan intelligence officer Ali Omar Mansour for questioning in the UTA case. Bruguiere ordered him released on December 5, 1994.
Bruguiere visited Libya on July 5–18, 1996, and questioned 40 people.
On March 10, 1999, a French antiterrorism court sentenced in absentia Abdesslam Issa Shibani; Abdesslam Mamouda, who purchased the bomb timer in Germany; Senoussi; Elazragh; Ibrahim Naeli; and Arbas to life in prison.
On July 16, 1999, Libya gave $33 million to France to compensate families of the victims. On January 9, 2004, the Qadhafi Foundation said it would add $170 million in compensation in four installments.