Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

AIR TRAVEL SECURITY • 11people seeking political asylum in other nations or else criminalsseeking to hijack a plane to a remote destination in order to evadecapture within their own country. Few of these situations involvedhostage-barricade incidents on the ground. Countermeasures takenby nations whose airlines tended to be targeted frequently includedinitiatives like the U.S. Sky Marshal Program, begun in 1970,in which armed U.S. marshals were allowed to fly undercover onselected flights; the use of profiling and preboarding interviews ofpassengers intending to fly on Israel’s El Al airline; and intensifiedscreening of passengers and luggage carried out in British, French,and German international airports. Such programs have been publicizedin order to deter would-be hijackers. In 1972 the U.S. governmentrequired X-ray screening of luggage, and passengers and otherswere required to pass through metal detectors before being allowedinto the boarding areas in airports. As a result of these measures, hijackingsdecreased from 33 percent of the terrorist acts in 1968–1969to about 7 percent in the 1970s to about 4 percent in the 1980s. Whilehijackings accounted for about 10 percent of terrorist incidents duringthe 1990s, this was due, in part, to the fall in the absolute numbersof terrorist incidents worldwide.The sanctions placed on nations giving hijackers sanctuary havelessened the numbers of possible destinations for would-be hijackers,and the strict security measures at most airports in most developednations have rendered hijacking more a phenomenon limited tounderdeveloped nations with minimal airport security. Moreover,France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, the United States, and morerecently, Peru, have developed hostage-rescue response capabilitiesthat put hijackers intending to hold hostages on an airport runway ata distinct disadvantage.With the denial of opportunities for hijacking, most terrorismagainst airliners has turned to the more deadly form of bombingairliners in flight. Since 1985, approximately 1,000 passengers andcrew members have been killed by bombs planted on airliners. Althoughluggage and carry-on items can be X-rayed, this does notensure detection of all bombs. In 1986 Nizar Hindawi arranged tohave a briefcase carried onto an El Al airliner, in which the explosivematerial had been coated evenly throughout the interior of thebaggage, making it virtually undetectable to X-rays. Most explosivematerials can be detected by neutron-activation screening devices,