by Ann Williams
Elie Hobeika, commander of the militia forces who had perpetrated the attack, also went on to become a powerful political figure in his country, as a minister in the Lebanese government. However, he met a violent end when in January 2002, when he became the victim of a car bomb. At the time, he had been about to give evidence against Sharon in the upcoming Belgian trial; this, of course, prompted a great deal of speculation as to who was behind the assassination. Hobeika had no shortage of enemies, and there were several suspected parties: the PLO and other Palestinian organizations, the Syrians, the Israelis and the CIA. No one was ever brought to trial for the assassination, but the consensus is that, for complex political reasons, the Syrians were probably behind it.
Today, with continuing conflict in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, there seems little likelihood that the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre will ever be brought to justice. Sadly, when BBC journalist Martin Asser visited the area 20 years after the event, all that he found to mark the graves of the many victims who lost their lives there was a pile of breeze blocks – a telling sign of the continuing poverty and powerlessness of a persecuted refugee community.
Gulf Air Flight 771
Don’t be alarmed, there’s nothing wrong with this plane. But, we do have a rather unusual circumstance here.
Captain Gordon Vette
The bombing of Gulf Air Flight 771 was the only terrorist attack ever to have taken place on this airline, but it was a fatal one, killing the entire crew and passengers outright. In a matter of minutes, as the bomb detonated and the plane plummeted out of the sky into the desert, six crew members and 111 passengers were dead. After the tragedy, it was suspected that the attack was the work of the notorious Abu Nidal organization, which was also behind many other atrocities during the 1970s and 1980s. However, it was not until Abu Nidal himself died in 2002 that the organization claimed direct responsibility for the attack.
On September 23, 1983, Gulf Air Flight 771 took off from Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates to fly to Karachi, Pakistan. There was no sign that anything was amiss. The aeroplane was a modern Boeing 737, and the airline was a well-established one. Gulf Air had been in existence since the 1940s, set up by a British pilot named Freddie Bosworth, who had operated a small commuter service between neighbouring Arab countries. Since that time it had become a highly successful airline, at first supported by the British aviation industry, and then sold to the governments of Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, and Oman, to create a national carrier for the gulf states. By the 1980s, as air travel had increased, so Gulf Air had expanded, boasting a fleet of up-to-date aircraft that reflected the wealth of its owners and becoming one of the major carriers for flights out of Abu Dhabi to a variety of destinations around the world. It also held a completely clean record for safety in the air: up until that fateful day, there had been no major accidents or incidents on Gulf planes. All that was to change – within seconds.
DESERT DISASTER
Unknown to the crew and passengers of the aircraft, a bomb was hidden in the baggage compartment, and at 3.30 p.m. it exploded. The pilot immediately sent out a distress message and attempted an emergency landing in the desert. But it was too late: the aeroplane caught fire and was unable to land safely, crashing on its descent and killing everyone on board.
At first it was unclear what had caused the crash, but as security services sifted through the wreckage in the desert, it became clear that there had been a bomb on board the aeroplane. But who had planted it, and why?
Over the following weeks, as the relatives of the crash victims began to mourn their dead, there was a great deal of speculation as to the perpetrators of this latest atrocity. Eventually, it became clear that the most likely culprit behind the bombing was the infamous Abu Nidal and his organization.
REIGN OF TERROR
Nidal was a Palestinian revolutionary who had started out with clear political aims, but who appeared, over his career, to have become entirely callous and opportunistic in his attacks, to the point of becoming a mercenary: ‘a gun for hire’, as some commentators put it. There were also those who claimed that Nidal was, or had become, a psychopath: as well as the random cruelty of his terror attacks, he showed a paranoid distrust of members of his own organization, and his sadistic treatment of them was legendary.
By the 1980s, there was ample evidence to show that Nidal’s reign of terror had left him isolated from other revolutionary groups, and that he had few supporters left. There were also few countries willing to offer a home to such a dangerous, unruly subject, and he was running out of places to live – not to mention ways of making a living. Accordingly, he was starting to blackmail the governments of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, threatening to mount terror attacks on their territory unless they paid him large amounts of money. And, for a while, his protection racket seems to have worked: soon after the attack on Gulf Air Flight 771, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates paid Nidal a substantial sum. This was not, of course, made public. However, it is now common knowledge that in the 1970s and 1980s a number of Arab state leaders offered protection of different kinds to international terrorists, whether because they shared political and spiritual beliefs, or simply because they wanted immunity from terrorist acts on their soil.
MERCENARY OR REVOLUTIONARY?
So who was Abu Nidal, this shadowy figure, who managed to do business with heads of state while at the same time blowing up their aeroplanes and terrorizing their people? Abu Nidal or ‘father of struggle’, as he dubbed himself, was born Sabri Khalil al-Banna in 1937 in Jaffa, a town on the coast of what was then known as the British Mandate of Palestine. His childhood was one of extreme disturbance and disruption, both emotional and social. His father, Khalil, was the wealthy owner of one of Jaffa’s largest orange groves. Khalil was married with 11 children, but then took another wife, a 16-year-old maid, who gave birth to Sabri, the future terrorist. When Khalil died, the family threw his mother out of the house; seven-year-old Sabri was allowed to stay, but grew up neglected and unloved. The family then lost their orange groves, as a result of the partition of the area after the World War II, and fled to refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.
Not surprisingly, as a young man Nidal became a lifelong Palestinian nationalist, moving around the Arab world and setting up revolutionary terrorist groups. He also became a highly successful businessman, with companies that acted as fronts for his political activities. He then severed his links with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), publicly criticizing Yasser Arafat, and mounted his first terror attacks. Ostensibly, there were political differences between the PLO and Nidal’s organization; but it soon became clear that, by this time, Nidal was acting to save his own skin and line his own pocket, rather than to pursue any clear political objective. The PLO came to regard Nidal as a mercenary rather than a revolutionary; and as his career progressed, other radical leaders came to the same conclusion, eventually leaving him and his followers completely isolated.
BIZARRE TORTURES
Over the years, rumours began to circulate that Nidal was losing his mind. Ex-members of his organization, now called the Fatah-Revolutionary Council (FRC) and operating in Syria, told lurid stories of how Nidal had begun to hold his own followers captive, accusing them of being spies and torturing them. He routinely forced members to write out their life histories, again and again, and if they got any detail wrong, subjected them to bizarre tortures: they were forced to sleep standing up, fed through tubes, or had boiling oil poured over their genitals. Horrifyingly, there were also reports of purges, in which hundreds of followers had been shot and buried in mass graves.
Amazingly enough, throughout all this, Nidal was running an extremely successful business operation. The FRC’s companies – under a variety of different names – were making huge amounts of money by selling arms from European and American companies to the Middle East and laundering money throu
gh respected international banks such as BCCI. Nidal was also hobnobbing with powerful Arab heads of state such as Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. He is thought to have mounted several appalling atrocities on behalf of Gaddafi, the worst being the Lockerbie air disaster of 1988. The FRC was also suspected of masterminding over 100 other attacks during the 1980s, which killed and wounded a total of 900 people in 20 countries around the world.
NOWHERE TO RUN
By the new millennium, however, Nidal’s reign of terror was beginning to crumble. His opportunistic, mercenary tactics had, not surprisingly, left him with few friends. In 1999, hoping to renew diplomatic relations with the West, Gaddafi expelled Nidal from Libya. Nidal went to live in Baghdad, apparently under the protection of the Iraqi government, even though he was wanted for murder in Jordan for his part in a terror attack there. On August 19, 2002, he was reported to have died of gunshot wounds, in a house in a rich district of Baghdad owned by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Secret Service. The Iraqis claimed he had committed suicide during a raid on the house; Palestinian and other sources suggested that Saddam Hussein had ordered the killing.
After Nidal’s death, one of his former aides, Atef Abu Baqr, confirmed what had long been suspected, that the Gulf Air bombing had been personally ordered by Abu Nidal, as a punishment for the United Arab Emirates’ refusal to pay protection money to the FRC. Baqr suggested that this action had ‘displeased’ the Iraqis, and it was for this reason that they had changed their attitude towards Nidal.
The story behind the Gulf Air Flight 771 disaster is, on the one hand, the story of a violent terrorist with a warped mind, bent on destroying the civilized world. On the other hand, it is the story of how elements of that world colluded with him, in a complex power game of political intrigue and financial double dealing that ultimately led to the deaths of many innocent victims.
Harrods Bomb Blast
The public’s reaction to the Harrod’s bomb has been the same as the government’s – that the fight against terrorism must go on and be won.
Margaret Thatcher
At 1.00 p.m. on December 17, 1983, a large explosion rocked the district of Knightsbridge located in the heart of London. It is an area of luxurious apartments, mews houses and exclusive shops, and where the famous Harrods department store is situated. The founder of Harrods was a man named Charles Henry Harrod and, from the day it opened in 1849, the store always prided itself on a reputation for excellence. In 1883, the store burnt to the ground at the beginning of December, but Harrod’s son, Charles Digby, not only succeeded in fulfilling all of his Christmas deliveries, but also made a new record profit for the store. A new building rose out of the ashes, and for the first time it could boast about legendary customers such as Oscar Wilde, Lilly Langtry and Ellen Terry.
The current owner of Harrods is Mohammad Al Fayed, an Egyptian-born, Swiss-based businessman who has had a tempestuous relationship with the British authorities over the years, constantly being turned down for British citizenship. He has also become famous in more recent years for his conspiracy claims against the Royal Family in regards to the death of his son Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana in a Paris car crash.
THE BLAST
The famous shopping district of Knightsbridge was busy with Christmas shoppers and everyone was jostling in and out of the shops buying their seasonal gifts. Suddenly a huge blast ripped through the throng of people, sending out a mass of thick black smoke, rubble and shards of broken glass. A large plume of smoke rose above Harrods, coming from the Hans Crescent end of the store. The scene was one of utter devastation and people stood dazed, not quite sure what had happened.
A bomb had apparently exploded in a car in one of the side streets outside the famous department store. Many people were walking round wounded, while others lay unable to move.
Immediately after the blast there was a strange silence, but when it sank in exactly what had occurred, there were screams, shouts and crying. People who weren’t too badly hurt, stopped to help those who were more seriously injured until the emergency services arrived at the scene. The pavement was like a sea of glass, tainted red by all the blood.
People sat or lay numbly, waiting to be helped, surrounded by the distinctive olive and gold shopping bags from the Harrods store. Brightly wrapped gifts lay in the streets among the grim remnants of the explosive-laden car.
Sirens could be heard wailing their way through the busy streets of London and amid all the chaos somebody said, ‘They’ve bombed Harrods!’
Four hospitals were put on emergency alert, ready to receive the people who could not be treated at the scene. The toll at the end of the day was six people dead, including three policemen and one American, and 90 injured.
Inside Harrods the reaction was shocked horror as some of the people witnessed the force of the explosion as several windows were blown in. A mother clutched her two children in complete terror at the top of the stairs, too scared to move. The employees, who tried their best to remain calm, started to lead people out by a side entrance. It wasn’t until they got outside that they realized the full gravity of the situation.
These were the days before mobile phones, and it was hard for people to get word to their families that they were unhurt in the explosion. A large queue formed outside a phone box in the vicinity.
Lying in the gutter was a severely injured policeman and his dog, the man pleading for help. In the middle of the road, was another policeman who was in an even worse state, he was severely traumatized and unable to speak or move. Lying beside him was his walkie-talkie, which he was probably using to warn of a suspicious looking car, just before it exploded. The scene was horrific and for the rest of the day many people were wandering around London stunned and in tears.
WARNINGS
The police were given a coded warning at 12.45 p.m., saying that there was a bomb in a car outside the Harrods store in Knightsbridge. As officers cordoned off the area and began a detailed search to make sure there were no more hidden explosives, a second warning call was made. This call warned of a bomb in the heart of the shopping district of London, Oxford Street.
Police hurriedly tried to clear the crowded area, but the warning of a bomb which was claimed to be outside the C&A store, turned out to be a false alarm.
The following day the Irish Republican Army (IRA) claimed responsibility for the explosion, saying that it was part of a pre-Christmas bombing campaign they had planned for London. The police moved hundreds of extra police, including plain clothes officers and mobile bomb squads, into the city, in an effort to protect the public from any further attacks.
HARRODS REOPENS
Harrods reopened for business three days later under tight security, saying the store would not be defeated by acts of terrorism. The police introduced new anti-terrorist measures to prevent a repetition of the car bomb. Although many Londoners who had been interviewed by the media claimed they would not be put off by Irish terrorists, Christmas shopping the following week got off to a slow start.
On December 20, detectives made a series of early raids and arrested four suspected sympathizers of the IRA, but no official charges were ever made.
Terrorism is one of the greatest scourges that the world faces today, especially when the target is innocent people – for example, people simply doing their Christmas shopping. The terrorist activities of the IRA have been going on for more than two decades and have been an evil inspiration to terrorists worldwide. The success of bombs, such as the one at Harrods, only heightens our awareness of their presence, which is exactly what they want.
There are currently more than 60 paramilitary fighters who are sought in connection with terrorist-related crimes that took place before 1998. These people could benefit from a new Northern Ireland Offences Bill, which is currently being discussed in the House of Commons. Under this new legislation, many terrorist suspects could be released and would be free to return to Northern Ireland.
The Brighton Bomb
My failur
e to kill former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made it possible for future peace talks to take place.
Patrick Magee
The bombing of the Conservative Party Conference at Brighton in 1984 sent shock waves through Britain. This was the first time a terrorist attack aimed at assassinating the entire British government cabinet had taken place on the mainland. On October 12, in the early hours of the morning, a huge explosion ripped through the Grand Hotel, where senior party members were staying. Such was the force of the blast that a huge section of façade of the building was blown off, several interior floors collapsed, and a fog of thick dust hung in the air for hours afterwards. Incredibly, all the members of the cabinet, including Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, escaped with their lives. However, five people were killed, and 34 were injured, including Mary Tebbit, the wife of cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, who was left permanently disabled. After the attack, the Provisional Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility, issuing a chilling warning: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.’
BOMB IN THE BATHROOM
That year, Conservative party members had gathered from all over the country for their annual conference in Brighton. Top MPs and officials stayed at the Grand Hotel, an impressive, old-fashioned Victorian hotel on Brighton’s promenade. There were also party members and media crews staying next door, at the Metropole Hotel and at other hotels in the area. As always, there was something of a festive air at the conference, with crowds gathering to cheer politicians’ speeches and celebrating afterwards, staying up drinking and talking until the small hours. The fact that the prime minister was celebrating her 59th birthday during the conference added to the general excitement that year.
