Egypt Air Flight 648

 

Over the years, I have had to adapt to the effects of being shot in the head and the resulting brain injury, which includes impaired vision and a loss of short-term memory.

survivor, Jackie Pflug

 

The hijacking of Egypt Air Flight 648, and the commando raid that ended it, caused the deaths of 58 passengers out of a total of 90 on the aeroplane. The high death toll of this horrible attack, which took place in 1985, has given it a place in history as one of the most tragic incidents of its kind: not only because the hijackers were so brutal, shooting passengers in cold blood at point-blank range, but also because the authorities handled the situation so badly, leading to further deaths, which many felt could have been avoided.

 

Armed Terrorists

 

On the evening of November 23, 1985, passengers waited at Athens airport to board their flight to Cairo. Security was high, as only a few months before there had been a major hijacking incident on a flight out of the airport to Rome, in which gunmen had commandeered a plane for days, and one passenger had lost his life (TWA flight 847, see page 284). Athens security services were apparently checking baggage on all outgoing flights thoroughly (later, they insisted that they had conducted five checks on the flight to Cairo). Nevertheless, three Palestinian terrorists somehow managed to escape detection, even though they were heavily armed with hand grenades and pistols. How this happened was never satisfactorily explained by officials at Athens airport.

Entirely unaware of the terrifying ordeal awaiting them, the passengers boarded the Boeing 737 for their flight to Cairo. The crew, led by pilot Hani Galal, prepared for take off, and Egypt Air Flight 648 soared into the air at 9.00 p.m. All went well until ten minutes into the flight, when the three terrorists suddenly leapt up, brandishing their weapons and announcing themselves as ‘The Egypt Revolution’. In a bizarre parody of official bureaucracy, they began their reign of terror on the aeroplane by checking all the passengers’ passports. Naturally enough, the passengers complied with the gunmens’ wishes, realizing that they were in mortal danger.

 

Shoot-Out in the Air

 

There was one passenger, however, who chose to resist. He was an armed undercover police officer, or ‘sky marshal’. He took out a gun and shot at the hijackers, managing to kill one of them. However, even though one of the gunmen was dead, the situation was now worse, in several ways: the other two hijackers, not surprisingly, became even more aggressive; other passengers were caught in the crossfire and seriously wounded; and, most frightening of all, one of the bullets made a hole in the aeroplane’s fuselage. This caused major decompression in the aeroplane, and the pilot had to fly as low as possible to avoid disaster.

The two remaining gunmen now ordered the terrified crew to fly to Libya, but there was not enough fuel to complete such a long flight, so they decided that Malta was a better destination. However, they were wrong, as it turned out; when they came into airspace over Malta, the officials at Luqa Airport refused to allow the aeroplane to land. The pilot made it known that there were wounded passengers on board, that the plane had been badly damaged, causing low air pressure inside the cabin, and – as if that were not enough – that their fuel was running out. But the Maltese authorities could not be persuaded, and threatened to turn off the airport lights if the aeroplane tried to land.

 

Hostages Murdered

 

With great skill and courage, Galal managed to bring the plane down safely, despite the fact that it was damaged and he could not see where he was going. Once on the ground, the Maltese Prime Minister Carmelo Mifsud decided to take over negotiations. Unfortunately he and his aides were not very experienced in this kind of situation, and the government were later heavily criticized about the way they handled the crisis. Immediately after the plane landed, it was surrounded by armed Maltese troops (though it later transpired that they did not have any bullets in their guns). Communicating from the airport control tower via an interpreter, Prime Minister Mifsud took a stern line and refused to allow the plane to be refuelled until all the hostages were released. He also refused to withdraw the soldiers surrounding the aircraft.

Initially, two crew members who had been wounded in the fighting on board were allowed to leave the aircraft. Next, 11 passengers were released. But as the Prime Minister and the hijackers reached stalemate on the issue of refuelling and hostage release, the crisis escalated. The hijackers began to shoot passengers at random, beginning with an Israeli woman named Tamar Artzi. Their leader, Omar Mohammed Ali Resaq, then threatened to kill another passenger every quarter of an hour unless the authorities conceded to their demands. Tragically, he was not bluffing: he went on to shoot Nitzal Mendelson, Jacqueline Pflug, Scarlett Rogenkamp, and Patrick Scott Barker. Amazingly, three of them (Artzi, Pflug and Barker) survived.

 

Commando Raid

 

Prime Minister Mifsud had played for high stakes in his negotiations, and it now looked as though he was losing. The US, France and Britain, all of whom had highly trained, experienced antiterrorist experts at their disposal, offered to send help, but Mifsud refused. Fearful of becoming entangled in a conflict between the US and the Arab world, the prime minister was trying to steer a neutral path, but dismally failed to resolve the crisis at hand. When Egypt offered to intervene, Mifsud jumped at the chance, allowing their troops to come in and take control of the situation. As it turned out, this proved to be the worst of his mistakes.

The Egyptians flew in a US-trained antiterrorist squad, the 777 Combat Unit, known as ‘Al-Sa’iqa (Thunderbolt), under the leadership of Major-General Kamal Attia, who prepared to storm the plane in a commando-style raid on the morning of November 25. As their name suggested, the squad was not known for its delicacy or patience in situations of conflict. The negotiations continued, but the soldiers could not wait to spring into action and went on to storm the plane an hour and a half before the operation was supposed to take place. In an incredible display of stupidity, they tried to blast off the plane doors and the cargo hold with explosives, causing a fire on the plane that killed many of the passengers. They then stormed the aircraft, shooting at the hijackers and killing further passengers in the process. In a panic, the hijackers also let off hand grenades inside the aeroplane, which added to the carnage. By the end of the raid, 56 out of the 88 passengers who had managed to survive the ordeal so far, lay dead.

 

Tragic Blunders

 

The blunders continued when the one surviving terrorist, Omar Resaq, who had led the operation, managed to escape. In the confusion of the raid, he was wounded, his lung pierced by a bullet, so he took off his mask, dumped his gun and hand grenades, and pretended to be a passenger. He was sent to the local hospital in an ambulance. It was only when he was in the hospital for treatment that other passengers recognized him as the perpetrator of the attack and reported him. Had they not done so, he might well have escaped detection and walked away a free man.

As the only surviving member of the hijacking team, Resaq was arrested and tried in Malta. He had been seriously injured in the attack, but he recovered enough to face trial there. He was charged on nine counts, including causing the deaths of Mendelson and Rogenkamp, and attempting to kill other passengers. He pleaded guilty to seven of the charges and was given a 25-year sentence. He was jailed in Malta, but actually only served seven years of his sentence before being released. He went to live in Ghana, before being tracked down by FBI agents in Nigeria, who extradited him and brought him to the US for trial. This time, he was given a life sentence without parole.

The hijacking of Egypt Air Flight 648 raised some extremely important issues in terms of the international handling of terror attacks. First, the issue of sky marshals. Should there have been an armed guard on the plane, and should he have opened fire? Many believe that the presence of armed guards on aeroplanes increases the risk of fatalities in terror attacks, either through direct killings as a result of crossfire, or through damaging the aeroplane itself. (Others point to the safety record of El Al, Israel’s national carrier, which has a heavy presence of armed guards on its aircraft, but which has only sustained one terror attack, in 1968.) Next, the issue of negotiations: should countries handle their own talks with terrorists in situations of crisis, as happened in Malta, or should a politically neutral, international negotiating team be called in? And finally, the issue of commando-style armed raids: should they ever be used in situations like these? Or is the human cost of such operations simply too high – as happened in the case of Egypt Air Flight 648?