Gulf Air Flight 771

 

Don’t be alarmed, there’s nothing wrong with this plane. But, we do have a rather unusual circumstance here.

Captain Gordon Vette

 

The bombing of Gulf Air Flight 771 was the only terrorist attack ever to have taken place on this airline, but it was a fatal one, killing the entire crew and passengers outright. In a matter of minutes, as the bomb detonated and the plane plummeted out of the sky into the desert, six crew members and 111 passengers were dead. After the tragedy, it was suspected that the attack was the work of the notorious Abu Nidal organization, which was also behind many other atrocities during the 1970s and 1980s. However, it was not until Abu Nidal himself died in 2002 that the organization claimed direct responsibility for the attack.

On September 23, 1983, Gulf Air Flight 771 took off from Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates to fly to Karachi, Pakistan. There was no sign that anything was amiss. The aeroplane was a modern Boeing 737, and the airline was a well-established one. Gulf Air had been in existence since the 1940s, set up by a British pilot named Freddie Bosworth, who had operated a small commuter service between neighbouring Arab countries. Since that time it had become a highly successful airline, at first supported by the British aviation industry, and then sold to the governments of Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, and Oman, to create a national carrier for the gulf states. By the 1980s, as air travel had increased, so Gulf Air had expanded, boasting a fleet of up-to-date aircraft that reflected the wealth of its owners and becoming one of the major carriers for flights out of Abu Dhabi to a variety of destinations around the world. It also held a completely clean record for safety in the air: up until that fateful day, there had been no major accidents or incidents on Gulf planes. All that was to change – within seconds.

 

Desert Disaster

 

Unknown to the crew and passengers of the aircraft, a bomb was hidden in the baggage compartment, and at 3.30 p.m. it exploded. The pilot immediately sent out a distress message and attempted an emergency landing in the desert. But it was too late: the aeroplane caught fire and was unable to land safely, crashing on its descent and killing everyone on board.

At first it was unclear what had caused the crash, but as security services sifted through the wreckage in the desert, it became clear that there had been a bomb on board the aeroplane. But who had planted it, and why?

Over the following weeks, as the relatives of the crash victims began to mourn their dead, there was a great deal of speculation as to the perpetrators of this latest atrocity. Eventually, it became clear that the most likely culprit behind the bombing was the infamous Abu Nidal and his organization.

 

Reign of Terror

 

Nidal was a Palestinian revolutionary who had started out with clear political aims, but who appeared, over his career, to have become entirely callous and opportunistic in his attacks, to the point of becoming a mercenary: ‘a gun for hire’, as some commentators put it. There were also those who claimed that Nidal was, or had become, a psychopath: as well as the random cruelty of his terror attacks, he showed a paranoid distrust of members of his own organization, and his sadistic treatment of them was legendary.

By the 1980s, there was ample evidence to show that Nidal’s reign of terror had left him isolated from other revolutionary groups, and that he had few supporters left. There were also few countries willing to offer a home to such a dangerous, unruly subject, and he was running out of places to live – not to mention ways of making a living. Accordingly, he was starting to blackmail the governments of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, threatening to mount terror attacks on their territory unless they paid him large amounts of money. And, for a while, his protection racket seems to have worked: soon after the attack on Gulf Air Flight 771, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates paid Nidal a substantial sum. This was not, of course, made public. However, it is now common knowledge that in the 1970s and 1980s a number of Arab state leaders offered protection of different kinds to international terrorists, whether because they shared political and spiritual beliefs, or simply because they wanted immunity from terrorist acts on their soil.

 

Mercenary or Revolutionary?

 

So who was Abu Nidal, this shadowy figure, who managed to do business with heads of state while at the same time blowing up their aeroplanes and terrorizing their people? Abu Nidal or ‘father of struggle’, as he dubbed himself, was born Sabri Khalil al-Banna in 1937 in Jaffa, a town on the coast of what was then known as the British Mandate of Palestine. His childhood was one of extreme disturbance and disruption, both emotional and social. His father, Khalil, was the wealthy owner of one of Jaffa’s largest orange groves. Khalil was married with 11 children, but then took another wife, a 16-year-old maid, who gave birth to Sabri, the future terrorist. When Khalil died, the family threw his mother out of the house; seven-year-old Sabri was allowed to stay, but grew up neglected and unloved. The family then lost their orange groves, as a result of the partition of the area after the World War II, and fled to refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.

Not surprisingly, as a young man Nidal became a lifelong Palestinian nationalist, moving around the Arab world and setting up revolutionary terrorist groups. He also became a highly successful businessman, with companies that acted as fronts for his political activities. He then severed his links with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), publicly criticizing Yasser Arafat, and mounted his first terror attacks. Ostensibly, there were political differences between the PLO and Nidal’s organization; but it soon became clear that, by this time, Nidal was acting to save his own skin and line his own pocket, rather than to pursue any clear political objective. The PLO came to regard Nidal as a mercenary rather than a revolutionary; and as his career progressed, other radical leaders came to the same conclusion, eventually leaving him and his followers completely isolated.

 

Bizarre Tortures

 

Over the years, rumours began to circulate that Nidal was losing his mind. Ex-members of his organization, now called the Fatah-Revolutionary Council (FRC) and operating in Syria, told lurid stories of how Nidal had begun to hold his own followers captive, accusing them of being spies and torturing them. He routinely forced members to write out their life histories, again and again, and if they got any detail wrong, subjected them to bizarre tortures: they were forced to sleep standing up, fed through tubes, or had boiling oil poured over their genitals. Horrifyingly, there were also reports of purges, in which hundreds of followers had been shot and buried in mass graves.

Amazingly enough, throughout all this, Nidal was running an extremely successful business operation. The FRC’s companies – under a variety of different names – were making huge amounts of money by selling arms from European and American companies to the Middle East and laundering money through respected international banks such as BCCI. Nidal was also hobnobbing with powerful Arab heads of state such as Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. He is thought to have mounted several appalling atrocities on behalf of Gaddafi, the worst being the Lockerbie air disaster of 1988. The FRC was also suspected of masterminding over 100 other attacks during the 1980s, which killed and wounded a total of 900 people in 20 countries around the world.

 

Nowhere to Run

 

By the new millennium, however, Nidal’s reign of terror was beginning to crumble. His opportunistic, mercenary tactics had, not surprisingly, left him with few friends. In 1999, hoping to renew diplomatic relations with the West, Gaddafi expelled Nidal from Libya. Nidal went to live in Baghdad, apparently under the protection of the Iraqi government, even though he was wanted for murder in Jordan for his part in a terror attack there. On August 19, 2002, he was reported to have died of gunshot wounds, in a house in a rich district of Baghdad owned by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Secret Service. The Iraqis claimed he had committed suicide during a raid on the house; Palestinian and other sources suggested that Saddam Hussein had ordered the killing.

After Nidal’s death, one of his former aides, Atef Abu Baqr, confirmed what had long been suspected, that the Gulf Air bombing had been personally ordered by Abu Nidal, as a punishment for the United Arab Emirates’ refusal to pay protection money to the FRC. Baqr suggested that this action had ‘displeased’ the Iraqis, and it was for this reason that they had changed their attitude towards Nidal.

The story behind the Gulf Air Flight 771 disaster is, on the one hand, the story of a violent terrorist with a warped mind, bent on destroying the civilized world. On the other hand, it is the story of how elements of that world colluded with him, in a complex power game of political intrigue and financial double dealing that ultimately led to the deaths of many innocent victims.