* Dr Basil al-Kubaisi, the PFLP’s logistics chief, had been assassinated by Israeli agents in Paris in April 1973 as part of the Wrath of God operation to avenge the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics a year earlier. Naming commandos after martyred comrades was common practice in the PFLP.
* Argüello and a steward were killed in the struggle, the former shot by a sky marshal.
* The Black September Organization (BSO) was a Palestinian terrorist group formed in 1970 by Fatah extremists in the wake of the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan. In September 1972, three months after the Sabena hijacking, it kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. All five Black September terrorists were also killed.
* An experimental farming community that gave each family an equal share of land. In a communal kibbutz, by contrast, the land belongs to everyone and private possessions were absent.
* In the 1930s, as the rest of the Zionist movement tried to build bridges with Palestinian Arabs and negotiated with the British for increased Jewish immigration, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party demanded an independent Jewish state that included the whole of Palestine and Transjordan. Its paramilitary wing, led by Menachem Begin, was known as Irgun.
* An underestimate that was close to the 228 passengers who had departed Ben-Gurion on Flight 139 that morning.
* Rote Armee Fraktion (in German). Founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler and Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF described itself as a communist and anti-imperialist urban guerilla group engaged in armed resistance to a fascist state.
* Of the 258 passengers and crew who left Athens, four were terrorists and one–Patricia Martell–had been allowed to disembark for medical reasons at Benghazi.
* All directions–left and right–are given from the perspective of a person looking out of the front windows of the Old Terminal on to the tarmac.
* Otherwise known as capture bonding, a psychological phenomenon in which hostages develop positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of identifying with them. It was named after a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm when several employees became emotionally attached to their captives during the six-day standoff, rejecting assistance and even defending their captors’ actions after they had been freed.
* He had recently written to both his brother Bibi and his parents that he intended to return to Harvard the following year.
* The telegram was referring to the deal between Israel and Egypt after the Yom Kippur War for the release of terrorists in Israeli jails in return for the bodies of Israeli soldiers killed by Egyptian forces.
* Olivier did not remember the note in his turn-ups until after it had been destroyed in the next wash.
* Dotan later became the IAF’s procurement chief with the rank of brigadier-general. Convicted in 1989 of embezzling $10 million from US military aid packages, he was reduced to the rank of private and spent thirteen years in prison.
* Khalatbari was Iranian foreign minister from 1971 to 1978. Found guilty of treason and corruption in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, he was executed by firing squad on 11 April 1979.
* Not his real name but a pseudonym given to him by Claude Moufflet in his book Otages à Kampala.
* A ceremonial ram’s-horn trumpet associated with holy festivals.
* An infamous incident in 1968 when a company of US troops ran amok in two Vietnam hamlets, killing more than 300 men, women and children, and raping and mutilating many of the victims. Their officer William Calley was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison with hard labour. He served three years under house arrest before being freed by a presidential pardon.