Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

HIJACKING • 257from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya. Twenty minutes after takeoff,three men claiming to be Ethiopians seized control of the cockpit,saying they had explosives. They demanded that the Boeing 767 beflown to Australia, and despite the pilot’s plea that they did not haveenough fuel to cross the Indian Ocean, the plane was forced to flyeastward anyway. Four hours after leaving Addis Ababa, the pilotwas able to crash the plane in the waters just off the beach of Mitsamoulion the Comoro Islands. The plane broke into two pieces and123 of the 175 passengers were killed, including the three hijackers.The worst hijacking incident to the present time involved the simultaneoushijacking of four U.S. passenger flights that were usedin the suicide operations in the World Trade Center and PentagonAttacks of September 11, 2001. Using crude knives and razors,teams of up to five hijackers each used threats of violence againstpassengers to force their way into the cockpits of four planes—AmericanAirlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, both flyingfrom Boston to Los Angeles, American Airlines Flight 77 leavingVirginia’s Dulles Airport, and United Airlines Flight 93, flying fromNewark to San Francisco—where they wrested control of the planesand flew them into their targets. One of the four hijacked planes,United Airlines Flight 93, had only four hijackers and crashed outsidePittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Last-minute cell phone calls by someof the passengers revealed that when the passengers had learned thefate of the other planes, they determined to overcome the hijackers toprevent their plane from being used in a similar manner.On 17 November 2002 an Israeli Arab, Tawfik Fukra, attempted tohijack an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul by rushing the pilot’scabin armed with a two-inch-long knife but was seized and overpoweredby Israeli air marshals. Fukra claimed to have been inspiredby the 9/11 hijackings and said he intended to crash the plane intotall buildings in Tel Aviv. On 19 March 2003 six Cubans hijackeda Cubana Airlines DC-3 and flew from the Isle of Pines to KeyWest, Florida, where they sought political asylum. On 11 December2003 the six Cubans were instead convicted in U.S. federal court oncharges of air piracy, conspiracy to commit air piracy, and interferingwith the operations of a flight crew and received minimum prisonsentences of 20 years. This trial and its verdicts reveal how the U.S.courts and public opinion had grown less tolerant of hijackings fromCuba to the United States even as supposed “freedom flights.” Seealso AIR TRAVEL SECURITY.