The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks

by Edward Mickolus

  Two years later, eight of the hijackers met in North Korea with visiting Japanese journalists and informed them that they felt that the hijacking had been a mistake.

  Three lawyers representing Yasuhiro Shibata, a URA member indicted for the hijacking, left for Pyongyang on January 8, 1989, to obtain evidence. Shibata’s trial was to begin on January 23, 1989. The lawyers planned to contact the six other URA members who had remained in North Korea to determine Shibata’s motives for secretly returning to Japan. Shibata, 35, was arrested in Tokyo in May 1988. Tamiya, 45, had sent a note to a Japanese magazine in May saying that all of the hijackers wanted to return to Japan but wanted to reach an agreement with the Japanese government that they be tried without detention when they came home. One of the hijackers had already died in North Korea.

  On January 9, 1990, Yukio Yamanaka, head of a support group known for its aid to imprisoned student demonstrators, said that he had met with four of the seven hijackers living in Pyongyang during his visit which began on January 2. Tamiya said that the group had no interest in returning home to be arrested but added that he wanted to negotiate with the Japanese government.

  On June 23, 1990, the hijackers wrote a two-page letter to Mainichi Shimbun in which the group urged the Japanese government to start negotiations regarding their possible return to Japan. However, they said that they would not surrender only to be arrested in Japan.

  On June 13, 1992, five women rejected a Foreign Ministry order to give up their passports. The five were among six Japanese women who went to North Korea to marry the hijackers. The ministry ordered the five women in August 1988 to hand over their passports because they offended the country’s interests by having contacts with North Korean agents. The ministry did not seek the return of the sixth woman’s passport. The Association in Support of Humanitarian Return of Hijackers of Yodo Airliner called on the government to permit them to return to Japan without being subjected to criminal charges. North Korea continued to reject Japanese requests for extradition.

  On January 29, 1994, the news media reported that Takahiro Konishi, 49, ran a letter in a URA sympathizers’ newsletter stating that he wanted his eldest daughter, 16, who is stateless, “to study together with her Japanese friends in the land of her ancestors.” He became the sixth URA hijacker to express interest in returning to Japan. This was the first time a letter with a hijacker’s name reached Japan from North Korea. He thanked the sympathizers for their letters and gifts, and said he “was able to understand the warmness of Japanese relatives” at a meeting three and a half years earlier in Pyongyang. The seven families of the hijackers include 17 children. Konishi said he wanted to send his oldest daughter and her 14-year-old sister to Japan that summer.

  On March 24, 1996, Cambodian police arrested a person believed to be Yoshimi Tanaka, 47, wanted for the hijacking. He was arrested on the Cambodian border for possession of several million dollars (face value) of counterfeit U.S. currency. Authorities handed him over to Thai police in Pattaya. Japanese police went there to fingerprint him and confirm his identity. The arrested man attempted to cross the border from Vietnam in a North Korean Embassy Mercedes. He was carrying a North Korean diplomatic passport. Three other North Korean diplomats attempted to bribe a policeman with $50,000 to let them pass through the checkpoint. Warrants had been issued on January 2, 1996, for Tanaka and four Thai men after they used five counterfeit U.S. $100 bills to buy film from a photo shop in Nong Preu village in North Phattaya. Thai police had earlier arrested the four Thais and seized sophisticated counterfeiting equipment from a home in Ang Thong Province. They claimed that Tanaka had hired them to produce the counterfeit notes, which resembled the newly designed $100 bill.

  The Japanese terrorist was believed to have worked with Somchai Nanthasan and Prasong Pholthiphet to forge the $100 bills. Police also believed that Tanaka was helped to launder the bills by Kodama International Trading, run by Tang Cheang Tong, alias Shogo Kodama, a Japanese citizen of Khmer–Chinese origin.

  Bangkok’s Asia Times reported that in 1994, the Philippine military arrested Eduardo Quitoriano, 41, the Communist Party of the Philippines international liaison officer to the JRA. He allegedly was involved in a $1.6 million counterfeiting case that was wrapped up in Switzerland in 1990.

  On March 26, 1996, Tanaka was extradited to Thailand to face forgery charges. The United States, South Korea, and Japan sought extradition from Thailand. Tanaka was indicted on April 11, 1996. He denied involvement in the case before a court on April 12. He was scheduled to be tried in June 1996.

  The hijackers were reported in 2002 by the Washington Post to have been involved in efforts to lure Japanese, particularly women, to North Korea. Key to these efforts was Tamiya, leader of the hijackers, who died in 1995. He hoped to use the women to create another generation of revolutionaries in the Japanese Revolution Village in North Korea. In testimony in Tokyo District Court on March 12, 2002, Megumi Yao, 46, former wife of a JRA member, said that she helped lure Keiko Arimoto, 23, a Japanese woman, from Copenhagen to Pyongyang in 1983 as part of the scheme. The Post quoted her as saying, “The assignment was to scout for and detain Japanese, and train them into core members of a revolution.” Yao was testifying in the trial of another JRA ex-wife charged with passport law violations.

  As of this writing, the other hijackers are believed to still be in North Korea.

  September 6, 1970

  Dawson's Field Multiple Aerial Hijackings

  Overview: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) preceded by three decades al Qaeda’s 9/11 quadruple aerial hijacking operation. The group dominated world headlines in September 1970 by diverting several European-origin planes to Dawson’s Field in Jordan. The Jordanian regime’s ultimate reaction to the Palestinian radicals’ challenge, eventually dubbed Black September, in turn led to the formation of a rival Black September Organization (BSO).

  Incidents

  West Germany. On September 6, 1970, at 12:20 P.M., two PFLP members took over Trans World Airlines (TWA) flight 741, a B-707 flying from Frankfurt to New York with 145 passengers and 10 crew. The plane was diverted to Dawson’s Field, Zerka, Jordan, a former U.K. Royal Air Force (RAF) landing strip in the desert. This was the first of a well-coordinated series of hijackings carried out by the PFLP. The group demanded the release of three PFLP members held in West Germany for the attack on the airline bus in Munich on February 10, 1970; three held in Switzerland for the Zurich attack on the El Al plane that had resulted in the killing of the copilot on February 18, 1969; and an unspecified number of fedayeen held in Israeli prisons. They later demanded release of Leila Khaled, held in a British jail after an unsuccessful hijacking attempt in the Netherlands. The group threatened to blow up the planes with the passengers inside by 3:00 a.m. on Thursday, September 10, 1970.

  A Beirut spokesman for the PFLP explained in a statement to the news media that U.S. planes were seized “to give the Americans a lesson after they supported Israel all these years” and to retaliate for U.S. peace initiatives in the Middle East.

  Upon landing, the guerrillas allowed 127 passengers from the planes at Dawson Field, mostly women and children, to go free in Amman. The remaining hostages were men from West Germany, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the United States. The planes were surrounded by commandos, who in turn were surrounded by troops from Jordan’s army, including 50 tanks and armored cars. The Swiss and Germans were willing to deal unilaterally with terrorists to free their own nationals, but British Prime Minister Edward Heath called upon all five governments to take a common position. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representative M. Rochat, who had acted as intermediary in the Athens Seven case on July 22, 1970, told the PFLP in Amman of their stand, which was to release the seven prisoners upon the release of all passengers. The Germans sent Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, a German Social Democrat party member, to Amman to negotiate on September 7, 1970. On September 11, two more Americans were released from the TWA jet. Anoth
er 18 hostages were secretly taken to Zerka and hidden in homes, because the attack squad began to distrust their PFLP leaders in Amman and wanted extra insurance against a double cross.

  The Israelis preferred to be observers in the Berne Five, and thus the Red Cross was named by only four of the members as their intermediaries. A three-member liaison group of Red Cross officials went to Amman to confer with PFLP members. The hijacking of the BOAC VC-10 led to an extension of the deadline in hopes that the United States would have more time to pressure Israel to capitulate. On September 12, 1970, the PFLP gave a five-minute warning that women and children would be released in Amman. The planes held at Dawson’s Field were evacuated and destroyed by PFLP explosives experts. On September 13, the last West German hostages were freed. Fifty-eight hostages remained, including the 18 secretly held in Zerka.

  The activities of the PFLP on Jordanian territory proved too much for King Hussein to tolerate, and Jordanian troops engaged the fedayeen in a series of bloody battles in what became known as Black September, in which approximately 7,000 died. Negotiations became of secondary importance to the embattled PFLP, and hostages were rescued sequentially by Jordanian army troops. On September 29, 1970, the Swiss government announced that seven Arab guerillas would be released by Switzerland, West Germany, and the United Kingdom when the Americans had safely left Jordan. They called upon Israel to release 10 Lebanese soldiers and 2 Algerians taken from an airliner on August 14, 1970, as a humanitarian gesture. The seven were released the next day.

  Switzerland. At 1:14 P.M., a Swissair DC-8 carrying 143 passengers and 12 crew was seized over France 30 minutes out of Zurich on its New York–bound flight by two men and a woman belonging to the PFLP. The plane landed in Zerka, almost on the tail of the TWA plane. The PFLP demanded the release of Leila Khaled for the British passengers (this was a bluff because no British passengers were held at the time), three terrorists in West Germany for the German passengers, three terrorists in Switzerland for the Swiss passengers, and an unspecified number of guerrillas in Israeli jails for the Israeli and American passengers. (On August 15, 1970, it was reported that there were 34 Arabs in Israeli jails.) The guerrillas set a 72-hour deadline. The next day, the guerrillas released 127 women and children in return for the Jordanian army’s retreating 2 miles from the planes. On September 12, 1970, PFLP operations chief Dr. Wadi Haddad ordered the destruction of the planes in Zerka. A $30 million plane was reduced to rubble in the blast.

  During negotiations, the commandos became suspicious of the intentions of their leaders and moved some of the hostages to Amman. They also turned away Red Cross supplies and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) buses that had been sent to collect the hostages. However, they did let another 23 hostages into Amman, most of them Indians. Of those hostages remaining, all but 38, including 5 Israeli girls, were allowed to go to the hotel. The 38 were split up and sent to various locations in Amman. These included nationals of Israel, Switzerland, West Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

  Netherlands (Pan Am flight 93). At 10:00 A.M., Pan Am flight 93, which was late in getting out of Amsterdam, was hijacked by two Arabs who probably met the FAA profile. They forced the plane to refuel in Beirut before picking up another PFLP member, who flew with the group to Cairo where the plane was destroyed. The trio included Sa’id Ali Ali, Samir Abdel Majid Ibrahim, and Mazin abu Mehanid Khalil, Palestinians whose forebears came from Chad. On board were 152 passengers and 23 crew, including 4 members of a deadheading crew. Two passengers, supposedly students registered in the names of Diop and Gueye, and carrying Senegalese passports, had been denied entry on an El Al plane (which had claimed to have oversold its first-class section). They had booked a flight to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, from which they would fly to Chile. They were to have been part of a PFLP group that was to hijack the El Al flight, but instead seized the 747. Each carried a revolver and hand grenade and had the plane circle Beirut for two hours because the Lebanese government did not wish to be involved in the incident.

  PFLP member Walid Kaddoura talked to the hijackers from the control tower and gave them instructions. A message from Jordan instructed the hijackers to fly to Cairo where the plane was to be destroyed. PFLP Capt. Ali allowed five men to refuel the plane. He was then instructed to separate the Jews from the other passengers, collect their passports, and keep them as hostages after leaving the plane.

  Nine PFLP members, including a woman, then boarded the plane armed with .45 caliber pistols and 80 pounds of dynamite. The group’s bomb expert stayed on board the plane with a pregnant woman and her husband; the others left. The demolitions expert, in his early twenties, set the fuses before the plane landed. The stewardess activated the emergency chutes and the passengers ran for cover before the $24 million plane was destroyed. In the rush, seven passengers were injured and later hospitalized. The rest went safely to an airport hotel. Egyptian authorities detained the trio of hijackers and began looking for a fourth hijacker they believed had escaped.

  The Netherlands (El Al flight 291). The last attempted hijacking of the day was against El Al flight 291, en route from Tel Aviv to New York, 30 minutes out of its stopover in Amsterdam. It was the only airliner of the four that included armed guards among its 145 passengers and 13 crew. However, the sky marshal of the first-class cabin of the B-707 had been mistakenly locked in the pilot’s cabin with pilot Uri Bar-Lev when the attack began. The original plan had called for a four-member PFLP team to hijack the plane. However, two members of the group had been denied boarding and instead hijacked a 747 to Cairo (they did not have navigational plans for Zerka). The duo had orders to meet Leila Khaled of the PFLP and Patrick Joseph Arguello, a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN), in the airport lounge after checking in. However, they made no attempt to warn their compatriots of their failure and boarded the 747, leaving Khaled and Arguello to fend for themselves.

  The hijacking began 25 minutes after takeoff. Arguello, armed with a grenade and pistol, held his gun to the head of a stewardess and demanded that the crew open a security door leading to the cockpit. A steward seized his gun arm, but was shot in the chest. Arguello’s automatic jammed when he tried to shoot him again. Arguello pulled the pin from his grenade and rolled it down the aisle. An Israeli security man stood up with a drawn revolver in the path of the grenade but was not harmed because the fuse was improperly set. Khaled claims that two or three Israeli security men plus three passengers jumped Arguello, beat him, tied him up, and shot him in the back four times. The Israelis claim that the tall security man shot him once. Khaled tried to use two grenades she had hidden in her bra, but was overpowered by two male passengers. An elderly American disarmed her. One crew member, Sholomo Vider, was injured by five shots. Israel radioed the pilot and pleaded that he return to Tel Aviv with the injured Khaled. However, he proceeded to London to allow prompt medical attention for Vider. Bar-Lev was criticized by his government for this decision. Arguello died under an oxygen mask in an ambulance, but Vider was saved.

  Khaled had previously captured headlines with a hijacking on August 28, 1969. When the plane landed in Heathrow Airport, the El Al security guards refused to let her go, and a tug-of-war ensued, with the Israelis pulling at her legs while the British police grabbed her shoulders. She was held in the Ealing police station. Three days later, the Israelis formally informed the British government that they intended to request extradition of Khaled. The same day, a BOAC jet was hijacked and Khaled’s name was added to the list of those the PFLP wanted released. She was flown on board a British RAF Comet on September 29, 1970, when it was announced that the British hostages had been flown to the RAF base in Akrotiri, Cyprus. The Comet made stops in Zurich and Munich to pick up other freed terrorists. On October 1, 1970, the seven Palestinians arrived in Cairo in time for Egyptian President Nasser’s funeral, but were not allowed to attend, being kept in a government guesthouse. Eleven days later, the
y flew to Damascus and Beirut.

  On April 23, 1996, she set foot on Palestinian soil for the first time in her adult life to attend a meeting of the Palestinian National Council. She refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

  May 30, 1972

  Machine Gun Attack in Lod Airport

  Overview: After the United Red Army (URA) hijacking on 1970, the Japanese URA splintered into several factions. Some blended into the radical scene in Japan, while a more dangerous Japanese Red Army (JRA) faction reached out to like-minded revolutionaries and anarchists in the Middle East and Europe. Turning its attention to their colleagues’ favorite targets—Israel, the United States, and other Western nations—the JRA offered its services in conducting proxy attacks. They garnered international media headlines by attacking Christian pilgrims on a visit to Israel.

  Incident: On May 30, 1972, three members of the JRA, on contract from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), fired machine guns and threw hand grenades at passengers arriving at Israel’s Lod Airport from an Air France flight, killing 28 and wounding 76. Two of the attackers died in the massacre. The plane, Air France flight 132, had arrived from Paris and Rome when the trio picked up their weapons at the luggage area, opened their suitcases, and pulled out their Czechoslovakian-made VZ-58 automatic rifles, whose butts had been removed, and six shrapnel grenades. The 116 passengers had just deplaned, and about 300 people were crowding into the waiting lounge. The terrorists fired 133 shots from their 7.63 caliber M43 weapons. Among those killed were 16 Puerto Rican Catholic pilgrims on a visit to the Holy Land. Twenty-seven others of the 68-member tour group were injured. Others killed included Israeli professor Aharon Katchalsky, one of the world’s foremost biophysicists. One of the terrorists, identified as Yasuyuki Yasuda, was killed accidentally by bullets from the rifle of Takeshi Okudeira (or Okidoro), 23, who was blown up by a grenade. The surviving member of the squad, Kozo Okamoto, 22 or 24, ran onto the tarmac outside the terminal in an attempt to blow up an SAS plane parked outside. He was tackled with two grenades in his hands by El Al traffic officer Hannon Claude Zeiton.