PAKISTANI authorities released four Palestinians who were involved in the bloody hijacking of an American plane in 1986.
The group commandeered a Pan Am jet at Karachi airport and the 16-hour drama ended when Pakistan troops stormed the plane.
The shootout left 22 people dead and more than 100 wounded. The hijackers were arrested and convicted by a Pakistani court.
"They had completed their sentences about four years ago and since then they had been living as internees," Adiala Jail superintendent Mohsin Rafiq said.
Negotiations were underway for their repatriation with the Palestinian authorities, he said.They were supposed to leave for their home country, according to Mr Rafiq.
And now, some history:
From the BBC:
1986: Karachi hijack ends in bloodshed
The 16-hour siege on a Pan Am jet in Pakistan has come to a bloody end, with at least 17 people dead.
Four gunmen, who boarded the Bombay to New York flight at Karachi Airport disguised as security guards, opened fire on the 390 hostages at 2130 local time (1630 GMT).
Some passengers were able to escape the carnage down one of the plane's emergency chutes, but it is thought to have been at least 10 minutes before Pakistani commandos reached the jet.
The still unknown hijackers, two of whom are believed to be dead, had earlier demanded a new flight crew to take them to Cyprus to secure the release of "friends".
The original crew escaped from the cockpit shortly after the gunmen boarded at 0500 (0000 GMT).
Most of the passengers on Pan Am 073 are Indian, but Americans, Italians, West Germans and Britons are also on the plane.
They were moved to the centre of the aircraft when the power began to fail and the jet was plunged into darkness.
Businessman Mohammed Amin said he heard one hijacker tell another: "The moment of the Last Jihad has arrived. If we are all killed we will all be martyrs."
They then counted "one, two, three" before they began shooting, he added.
US passenger David Jodice told reporters: "They were shouting at us in pitch darkness. We were totally panicked when they threw a hand grenade in among the passengers.
"I have seen a lot of blood - I cannot guess how many people were killed or wounded," he said.
The hijackers had already killed American passenger Rajesh Kumar, 29, and dumped his body out of the door when their demand for a new pilot was not met.
Two previously unknown groups - the Libyan Revolutionary Cells and the Jundallah (Soldiers of God) - have claimed the men were acting on their behalf. Experts say it is unlikely Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, fearful of more American raids on his country, will want to be openly associated with the hijacking.
IN CONTEXT
Twenty-two people died in the attack and over 150 were injured.
Contrary to initial reports, all the hijackers survived. They later admitted to being members of the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organisation.
Five men were convicted in Pakistan for their part in the attack in 1988. They were all sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to life imprisonment.
The Pakistani authorities released the leader of the hijackers, Zaid Hassan Abd Al-Latif Masud Al Safarini in September 2001, but he was quickly recaptured by the US. He was tried in an American court and in 2004 was sentenced to a 160-year prison term. The other four men remain in jail in Pakistan.
The Associated Press on the New York Times (July 7, 1988):
... Pakistani commandos stormed the plane after it sat on the tarmac for 17
hours. Two Americans were among the dead. Throughout the trial the
defendants blamed the Pakistani commandos for the killings. Judge Syed
Zafar Babar discounted that argument but found the defendants guilty of only 11
deaths, saying there was insufficient evidence to convict them of more....
...Mohammed Hafiz al-Turk, a Palestinian from Libya who is believed to have
planned the hijacking, was convicted of conspiracy. He was the only one of the
five not to board the Boeing 747. He was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan's
capital, less than a week after the hijacking.
The other four defendants - Mohammed Ahmed al-Munawar, Khalil Hussain
Rahayyal and Sayed Abdul Rahim, all from Lebanon, and Abdul Latif Sairfani, of
Syria - were convicted of hijacking and murder.
They were sentenced to death for their roles in the hijacking and to 10
consecutive life sentences for the deaths of 10 people. Three of the four men received an additional life sentence in the killing of an 11th person....
Abu Nidal's organization ... blast from the past. Tom Gross Media website has a good, brief history on Nidal, and some interesting tidbits ... like "plans for an American attack on Iraq were found in his Baghdad apartment" when he 'committed suicide' (August 17, 2002).
As for "Libyan Revolutionary Cells", try googling on that exact (with quotes) phrase, you get just 1 return - its a real Googlewhack! Unhide the "ommitted results", and you find the same content duplicated across two other sites about the "Libyan Revolutionary Cells" ... it would appear these are a product of some intel service's imagination.
On March 28, 2004, The Sunday Times reported:
....Disclosing this for the first time last week, western and Pakistani intelligence sources said Gadaffi had hired a group of Palestinian terrorists to hijack a Pan Am jumbo jet carrying 379 passengers and crew, including 89 Americans, and explode it over Tel Aviv.
Had the jumbo jet blown up and crashed into the city, as the Libyan leader intended, the carnage would have been colossal — much greater than that caused by the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, in which 281 people died.
But Gadaffi’s bomb plot failed. Pakistani troops stormed the plane while it was on the ground at Karachi airport. Twenty-two people, including two Americans, were killed and 100 wounded. All the terrorists were captured.
They have now completed their prison sentences in Pakistan. The first one to be freed has been rearrested by the American authorities, however, and convicted a second time for the hijacking.
Just before Christmas, Zayd Hassan Safarini was given three consecutive life sentences by a Washington court for murder, air piracy and hostage-taking after he struck an agreement with the court to escape a death sentence. When he was released he went to Amman, Jordan, but was later arrested by the FBI while changing planes at Bangkok airport. He had already spent more than 15 years in jail.
As a result the four others, including the Libyan mastermind, are refusing to leave prison in Pakistan. They fear that the moment they are free they too will be seized by a vengeful America and tried a second time.
Gadaffi himself has nothing to fear. Unlike Lockerbie, the Karachi hijacking has never been publicly blamed on him, although Pakistani and western intelligence agencies were soon aware that he was responsible and that the hijackers had been on a suicide mission.
In a clever ruse, Pakistani intelligence agents tricked the arrested hijackers into confessing that they were working for the Libyan leader. The incriminating details have remained secret until now, and the full details of the plot did not even come out at the trial.
One reason Libya was never publicly linked to the incident was Pakistan’s reluctance to tarnish the head of a Muslim state. There is widespread Pakistani sympathy for the Palestinian cause, which the hijackers said they were seeking to promote.
Indeed President Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani leader at the time, described the hijackers as “very motivated and highly volatile youngsters”.
...America is also rehabilitating the Libyan leader after he agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. But it has not given up on punishing the hijackers. Its arrest warrants still stand.
Revenge drove Gadaffi to order the Karachi hijacking. Five months earlier, in April 1986, President Ronald Reagan had sent jets to bomb Tripoli. Gadaffi himself was targeted. Scores died, including his one-year-old adopted daughter.
The American raid was punishment for the Libyan bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which two American servicemen died.
It put Gadaffi into a rage and he ordered the Libyan external intelligence service under his brother-in-law Abdullah Senoussi to retaliate.
According to intelligence sources, a plan was concocted with Gadaffi’s approval to hijack Pan Am flight 73 from Bombay to Frankfurt and New York and blast it out of the sky over Israel in reprisal.
Senoussi hired the services of Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian hitman. Nidal died in Baghdad in 2002, a broken reed. But in the 1980s, when he lived in Libya, his terrorist group was the most feared in the world. Financed by Libya he hired out gunmen to Arab governments to mount attacks on western and Israeli targets.
The terrorists flew to Pakistan and were provided with explosives and guns that had been smuggled in by diplomatic bag. They dressed up as Karachi airport security officers and seized the airliner when it landed on the first leg of its journey from Bombay. Beneath the uniforms, explosives were strapped to their bodies.
The operation went wrong when the American pilot escaped from an emergency exit. The plane was grounded. The hijackers executed an American passenger and dumped his body on the tarmac. After 18 hours trapped inside, the gunmen panicked when the lights failed. They opened fire and hurled grenades at the passengers as Pakistani troops stormed the plane.
All the terrorists were captured on the spot bar one — the Libyan organiser, Salman Ali al-Turki. He went on the run. But when he contacted the Libyan embassy a few days later asking them to contact Senoussi and arrange his escape from Pakistan, he was arrested.
The terrorists refused to break under interrogation so the Pakistani intelligence service concocted a brazen piece of deception. It tricked them into believing Gadaffi was dead by printing a dummy copy of a newspaper with a front page banner headline announcing his sudden demise in a plane crash.
When the paper was delivered to their cells, the terrorists broke down and confessed that the Libyan leader had sponsored their mission. It was no longer necessary to keep his role secret, they said, now that their hero was dead.
At the time of the hijacking, Gadaffi was attending a non-aligned summit in Harare, where he adopted a belligerent anti-American tone. He also planted a clue that gave him away, by boasting that an attack on America was imminent.
This statement, carried by a Libyan news agency, alerted the Pakistanis to Gadaffi’s possible involvement. But without the newspaper ruse they would never have known for sure. The Karachi hijacking was the first attempt by terrorists to crash an airliner into a city. It failed, but it set a deadly trend....
They're sentenced to hang, then commuted to life sentences .... and they're released a mere 15-16 years later. Well, it'll be interesting to see if those American warrants will get exercised.
The other affiliation - Jundallah - is described as a Sunni group in Iran, and is opposed to the Iranian government. Massoud Ansari on The Telegraph ('We will cut them until Iran asks for mercy', Jan 17, 2006) describes them as a fanatical Sunni group operating in southeastern Iran, and Tehran accuses the US of supporting them.
Margarita Snegireva on Pravda (Four members of terrorist Jundallah group killed by Iranian police, Dec 20, 2007) reported that four of their leaders had been killed in clashes with Iranian police; 12 had been killed in a shootout with security forces earlier in December; and one had been hanged in February for the killing of Revolutionary Guards in the bombing that month (media coverage of the bombings are on Chris Elliot's blogpost A War On Terrorism or a War Of Terrorism? on Democrats.com). In 2005, Jundallah kidnapped an Iranian intelligence officer (Shehab Mansuri) and murdered him. At WindsOfChange (May 22, 2005), Dan Darling reviews media reports about Jundallah, which claim that the al Qaeda infrastructure has established itself in the Gaza Strip and calls itself Jundallah.
From Greg Elich's Washington's Covert War inside Iran (Global Research Center, March 23, 2007, posted here and here on ZNet):
...According to a former CIA official, funding for armed separatist groups operating in Iran is paid from the CIA's classified budget. The aim, claims Fred Burton, an ex-State Department counter-terrorism agent, is "to supply and train" these groups "to destabilize the Iranian regime." (1)
The largest and most well known of the anti-government organizations is Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), operating out of Iraq.... Camp Ashraf ... located well outside of Baghdad, where many of the MEK fighters are stationed. But the camp
operates under the protection of the U.S. military, and American soldiers chauffeur MEK leaders. The Iraqi government is unlikely to get its way, as the MEK claims to be the primary U.S. source for intelligence on Iran. (3)....
...Reliance on the MEK began under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the direction of Vice President Dick Cheney, and soon MEK soldiers were being used in special operations missions in Iran. "They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all," said one intelligence official of the MEK's American handlers. (4)....
...The Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), is another organization that conducts cross-border raids into Iran. Israel provides the group with "equipment and training," claims a consultant to the U.S. Defense Department, while the U.S. gave it "a list of targets inside Iran of interest to the U.S."....
...Jundallah (God's Brigade) is an extremist Sunni organization operating in Sistan-Balochistan province that has been launching armed attacks, planting explosives, setting off car bombs, and kidnapping. Based in Pakistan, it is unclear if this group is connected with the Pakistani organization of the same name, which has ties with Al-Qaeda. (7) Jundallah denies that it has any links to either Al-Qaeda or to the U.S. But Iranian officials claim that a recently arrested Jundallah guerrilla has confessed that he was trained by U.S. and British intelligence officers. There is no way to verify that such a confession has actually taken place, nor its reliability as it may have come as a result of coercion, but the claim would not be inconsistent with U.S. policy elsewhere in Iran. (8)....
...CIA support for the anti-Soviet and anti-socialist Mujahedin in Afghanistan spawned a worldwide movement of Islamic extremism. Western support for ethnic secessionists shattered Yugoslavia and the invasion of Iraq fired the flames of ethnic discord and made a shared life impossible. It remains to be seen if the Bush Administration can succeed in achieving its goal of effecting regime change in Iran....
The Australian Government notes that there is member movement between Jundallah and Lashkar-e Jhangvi (LeJ) which "has assassinated Iranian nationals in Pakistan and was involved, along with the Jaish e-Mohammad, in the abduction and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002".
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