News organizations first obtained the dramatic sound file of Captain Testrake, the pilot of the hijacked place, communicating with the control tower: "He has pulled a hand-grenade pin and he is ready to blow up the aircraft if he has to. Videotapes had to be driven, under great danger, to Damascus, resulting in at least a three-hour delay in seeing pictures. Unlike the Iran hostage crisis or the assassination attempt on President Reagan, images were initially hard to get as Beirut still bore the scars of its civil war and had no functioning satellite dish. One of the hijackers, Mohammed Ali Hammadi, was arrested nearly two years later at the Frankfurt airport with explosives in his suitcase. Seven hundred Shia prisoners were released by Israel, which insisted that the release was not connected to the hijacking. They were driven to Syria and then flown to West Germany before being welcomed home by President and Mrs. President Ronald Reagan and Lebanese and Israeli officials, the remaining hostages were finally released. On June 30, 1985, two weeks of intense negotiations between U.S. Hezbollah held the forty remaining hostages in different locations throughout Beirut, making rescue missions impossible. The plane then flew back to Beirut, where it remained. An additional dozen well-armed hijackers boarded the plane, which flew back to Algiers, where sixty-five passengers and all five female cabin crew members were released. During that stop in Beirut, Robert Stethem was murdered, and seven America passengers with Jewish-sounding names were taken off the plane and held hostage in a Shia prison in Beirut. The plane then returned to Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, which was in the midst of a civil war with the city divided into sectors controlled by Shia militia including Amal and Hezbollah. The hijackers ordered the pilot to fly to Beirut, where nineteen passengers were allowed to leave, then to Algiers, where an additional twenty passengers were released. What followed was a two-week international ordeal, with passengers threatened and some beaten, and one fatality, Navy diver Robert Stethem, who was murdered and his body thrown onto the tarmac. They had smuggled weapons, a pistol, and two grenades on board and demanded the release of seven hundred Shi’ite Muslims from Israeli custody. Soon after takeoff, it was commandeered by two Lebanese men, Mohammed Ali Hammadi and Hasan Izz al-Din, members of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, the shadowy Shi'ite Muslim organization regarded as an umbrella for various fundamentalist terror groups operating in Lebanon and other Middle East countries. On Friday, June 14, 1985, the American plane TWA Flight 847 took off from Athens, with 139 passengers and a crew of eight. Schwarzkopf in Vietnam: A Soldier Returns.Caution: Water May Be Dangerous to Your Health.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |