EgyptAir Flight 648
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EgyptAir Flight 648 was a Boeing 737 airliner hijacked in 1985 by Palestinian militants. The subsequent raid on the aircraft by Egyptian troops led to dozens of deaths, making the hijacking of Flight 648 one of the deadliest such incidents in history.
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[edit] The hijacking
On November 23, 1985, Flight 648 took off at 9pm on its Athens to Cairo route. Ten minutes after take-off, three Palestinian members of the Abu Nidal Organization hijacked the aircraft. The hijackers, calling themselves the Egypt Revolution, were heavily armed with guns and grenades. The hijackers then proceeded to check all passports. It was at this point that an Egyptian sky marshal aboard the plane opened fire, killing one hijacker instantly before he too was fatally shot. However, in the exchange of fire, the plane's fuselage was punctured, and the plane was forced to descend to 10,000 feet to avoid pressurisation problems.
Libya was to be the original destination of the hijackers; however, due to the negative publicity the hijacking would have had if flown to Libya and the fact that the plane did not have enough fuel to reach Libya, Malta was chosen as a more suitable option. In spite of fact that the plane, now running dangerously low on fuel, was experiencing serious pressurisation problems and was carrying a number of wounded passengers, the Maltese authorities did not give permission to the aircraft to land (the Maltese government had already refused permission to other hijacked planes before, such on September 27, 1982 when an Alitalia aircraft was hijacked on its way to Italy and had asked permission to land in Malta). However, the Egyptair hijackers insisted, and they forced the plane's pilot, Hani Galal, to land at Luqa Airport. As a last ditch attempt to stop the plane from landing, the runway lights were switched off, but the pilot still managed to land the damaged aircraft safely.
[edit] Stand-off
At first the Maltese authorities were optimistic they could solve the crisis. Malta had good relations with the Arab world and it had successfully resolved a potentially more serious situation 12 years earlier when a KLM Boeing 747 landed in the same place under similar circumstances. The Maltese Prime Minister, Dr. Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, rushed to the airport's control tower and assumed responsibility for the negotiations. Aided by an interpreter, he refused to refuel the aircraft and to withdraw the Maltese armed forces which had surrounded the plane until all passengers were released. At first, 11 passengers and 2 injured flight attendants were allowed off. However, the hijackers soon started shooting hostages starting with Tamar Artzi, an Israeli woman. France, Britain and the United States all offered to send anti-hijack forces. Omar Mohammed Ali Resaq, the chief hijacker, threatened to kill a passenger every 15 minutes until his demands were met. His next victim was Nitzan Mendelson, another Israeli woman; he then shot three Americans, Patrick Scott Baker, Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp and Jackie Pflug. Of the five passengers shot, only Mendelson and Rogenkamp died.
The Maltese prime minister was by now under heavy pressure both from the hijackers and from the United States and Egypt, whose ambassadors were at the airport. The non-aligned Maltese government was fearing that either the Americans or the Israelis would arrive and take control of the area, as the US Naval Air Station of Sigonella was only 20 minutes away. When the U.S. told the Maltese authorities that Egypt had a special forces counter-terrorism team trained by US Delta Force ready to move in, they were granted permission to come. The Egyptian Al-Sa’iqa (Thunderbolt) 777 Combat Unit, under the command Major-General Kamal Attia, was flown in, led by four American officers. Negotiations were prolonged as much as possible and it was agreed that the plane should be attacked on the morning of November 25 when food was to be taken into the aircraft. Soldiers dressed up as caterers would jam the door open and attack that way.
[edit] The raid
Without warning, around an hour and a half before the planned time of the raid, the Egyptian commandos attacked the passenger doors and the luggage compartment doors with explosives. Maltese Prime Minister Bonnici claims that these unauthorized explosions caused the internal plastic of the plane to catch fire, causing widespread suffocation. On the other hand, the Times of Malta, quoting sources at the airport on the day, held that when the hijackers realised that they were being attacked, they lobbed hand grenades into the passenger area, killing people and starting the fire inside.
The storming of the aircraft killed 56 (out of the remaining 88 passengers) passengers, two crew members, and one hijacker. Only one hijacker, Omar Resaq, survived. The Egyptian commandos tracked Resaq to St. Luke's General Hospital and, holding the doctors and medical staff at gun point, they entered the casualty ward looking for him. Resaq, who was injured during the storming of the aircraft, got rid of his hood and ammunition and pretended to be an injured passenger. It was not until some of the other passengers in the hospital recognised him that he was eventually arrested.
A total of 58 out of the 90 passengers had died by the time the crisis was over.
Resaq was put on trial in Malta, yet with no anti-terror legislation, he was tried on other accounts. There was widespread fear that terrorists would hijack a Maltese plane or carry out a terror attack in Malta as an act of retribution. Resaq was given a 25-year sentence out of which he only served eight. His release caused a diplomatic incident between Malta and the U.S., but he was eventually captured in Nigeria, brought before a U.S., court and sentenced to life imprisonment on October 7, 1996.
[edit] Aftermath and criticism
Another face to the story was shown, in the book Massacre in Malta, by John A. Mizzi, who wrote that "Malta was faced with a problem it was ill-equipped to meet. The authorities took a firm stand to deny fuel to the hijackers but made no sensible provisions, through political bias and lack of experience, to meet the circumstances that arose from this decision. No proper team was set up at the outset to evaluate or deal progressively with the crisis, although only a few days previously an incident management course had been organised by a team of American experts in Malta at the request of the government." The book continues to add that "The Egyptian comandoes were given too free a hand and they acted out of their mission with little regard for the safety of the passengers. They were determined to get the hijackers at all costs and the Maltese government's initial refusal for US anti-terrorist resources (a US anti-terrorist team led by a major-general, listening devices and other equipment) offered by the State Department through the US embassy in Malta - a decision reversed too late - contributed in no small measure to the mismanagement of the entire operation.
Mizzi also mentions how the Maltese soldiers positioned in the vicinity of the aircraft were equipped with rifles but were not issued with bullets. Furthermore, an Italian secret service report on the incident showed how the fire inside the aircraft was caused by the Egyptian commandos who placed explosives in the aircraft cargohold, the most vulnerable part of the aircraft, as it held the oxygen tanks which blew up. During the whole incident only the Socialist Party media and the State-controlled television were given information of sorts. Such was the censorship of information that the Maltese people first heard of the disaster through RAI TV, when its correspondent Enrico Mentana spoke the following infamous words live on air via a direct phone call: "Parlo da Malta. Qui c'è stato un massacro ..." (I'm speaking from Malta. Here there's just been a massacre ...)
Decisions taken by the Maltese government drew heavy criticism from overseas. The Greek government was angered by the outcome of the incident as “it expected the Maltese government to consult it before the commandos went into the attack”. Italian Interior Minister Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, queried the Maltese handling of the hijacking and questioned whether Maltese authorities should have tried to stop the plane landing by switching off the runway lights adding that “Not to give landing permission is a crazy risk”. He also questioned the Maltese method of negotiations saying that “a hijacker is not going to suddenly become a Saint”. The fact that the Egyptian Commandos had stormed the aircraft without the authorisation of the Maltese Government and before special instruments had arrived from Italy to aid the attack showed that the Maltese Armed Forces had lost complete control of the situation at Luqa Airport.
The United States protested to the Maltese Government of the time for confining American personnel sent to resolve the issue into the Air Squadron HQ and in the U.S. embassy in Floriana. The United States had seen the situation as so ‘hot’ that it had ordered a number of US Naval ships, including an aircraft carrier to move toward Malta for contingency purposes. Malta was seen in the eyes of the world as the location of an atrocity and the failure of good sense and high training to prevent the worst.
Five days after Flight 648's hijacking, evidence remerged of continued Abu Nidal activity on the Island. On November 29, 1985, the Egyptian Embassy to Malta sent the Maltese Ministry of Foreign Affairs an urgent note saying that “the Egyptian Authorities had received information that a terrorist group composed of 5 to 7 persons and belonging to the Abu Nidal Organisation were about to arrive in Malta to assassinate Ali Resaq”, the only surviving hijacker who at the time was under intensive medical care at St. Luke’s Hospital. The Maltese Government never produced any detailed report on the incident with the only comprehensive account available comes from the Italian Secret Service.
