Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

256 • HIJACKINGcarriers were cases of people seeking to escape to some other country.At that time, the United States experienced scores of hijackers attemptingto divert domestic flights to Cuba. During the 1970s and 1980s,however, hijackings of airplanes were increasingly used to take the passengersas hostages in order to force the sovereign governments of thehostages to accede to the hijackers’ political demands, or those of theirstate sponsors. By the beginning of the 1990s, total airplane hijackingssince 1931, the year the first aerial hijacking occurred, were in excess of700, with a total of more than 500 passengers (including the hijackers)and crew members being killed.The problem of hijacking was compounded by the political offenseexception doctrine, which allowed some states to grant immunityfrom prosecution or from extradition selectively to hijackerswho claimed to be acting on political grounds or who claimed to bepolitical refugees seeking asylum. In April 1986, following the 1985Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 847 hijacking to Beirut airport,the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations put anembargo on Beirut airport and threatened to embargo other countriesthat tolerated hijacking. After the TWA Flight 847 hijacking, theUnited States began to apply the 1984 Hostage-Taking Act antiterroriststatute to prosecute hijackers who victimized American citizens,arresting Fawaz Younis in September 1987 for his role in an 11 June1985 hijacking of a Jordanian airliner carrying some U.S. citizens.Instances of nonaerial hijackings have included the Assen andBeilen train seizures by terrorists of the Free South MoluccanYouth Organization on 2 December 1975 and 23 May 1977 and thehijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by terrorists of the PalestineLiberation Front on 7 October 1985. In each of these instances,hostages were murdered by the hijackers, showing that nonaerialhijackings could be just as deadly.In late July and early August of 1994, to flee to the United States,Cuban refugees hijacked three civilian ferry boats and one civilianvessel being used by the Cuban military. In the seizure of the vesselunder military command, a Cuban officer was reportedly killed bythe hijackers. On 28 August 1995 the Liberation Tigers of TamilEelam hijacked a civilian ferry with 128 passengers, the Irish Mona,on its India-to–Sri Lanka route and sank two Sri Lankan naval gunboatsby handheld rockets fired from the hijacked ferry.The most deadly air hijacking to occur in the 20th century was the23 November 1996 hijacking of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 bound