Terrorism: Massacre in Malta | TIME

Its charred doors obscenely ajar and its windows darkened by soot, the burned-out hulk of a Boeing 737 was all that remained of EgyptAir Flight 648, once bound from Athens to Cairo with 98 passengers and crewmen aboard. As investigators milled about on the tarmac of the airport at Valletta, Malta’s capital, police and rescuers sifted through the fuselage for victims, their possessions and any clue that might help explain what had happened aboard the ill-fated craft. Occasionally a stretcher shrouded in plastic would emerge, a macabre reminder that the jetliner had become a tomb for 57 travelers.

Ever since commercial airliners first became a serious target of international terrorism in 1968, the world has feared the specter of a planeload of innocent people being destroyed, by either design or accident, in the course of a hijack drama. Over and over, at airports in the Middle East–and notably at Entebbe in Uganda and at Mogadishu in Somalia–the specter had been miraculously dispelled, the lives of innocents spared. The latest hijacking ended far more disastrously. Because of the demonstrated savagery of this particular band of terrorists, and perhaps because of mistakes made by well-intentioned governments and rescuers, only 38 of those aboard EgyptAir 648 survived.

Already the postmortems were under way in Malta, Cairo and various Western capitals. Malta’s Prime Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici defended his country’s long-standing policy of refusing to refuel a hijacked plane unless terrorists first released all passengers aboard. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused the hijackers of being members of a Palestinian terrorist group opposed to Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and closely aligned with Mubarak’s enemy, Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi. Though Mubarak did not mention the group by name, he seemed to be referring to the Abu Nidal faction, which has previously taken responsibility for a number of particularly heinous terrorist crimes.

Mubarak had been criticized in October for his seemingly indecisive handling of the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro, in which one passenger was killed. This time he moved briskly, sending a team of 80 specially trained commandos to Malta even as he placed his armed forces on alert and bolstered his defenses along the Libyan border. He authorized the commando operation only after the plane’s captain, Hani Galal, told the tower at Valletta: “Please do something. They’re going to kill us all.”

In the end, the commandos halted the hijacking but lacked the expertise, or perhaps merely the good fortune, to prevent a terrible loss of life. Late in the week autopsies revealed that eight of the victims had died from the effects of explosions and seven had been shot to death, including an American passenger, Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp, 38, of Oceanside, Calif. But no fewer than 44 had died from burns and smoke inhalation. Of the three to five terrorists on board, one or two survived. Experts in Malta debated whether the majority of deaths had been caused by the explosives detonated by the Egyptians in gaining entrance to the plane or by the grenades thrown by the hijackers when they realized that a rescue operation was under way. In truth, it hardly mattered, because the events of terrorism, attempted rescue and death had been so inextricably bound together. “Dear friends,” Captain Galal said mournfully after it was all over, “my aircraft was the same one that was hijacked to Sigonella.” It was indeed the same Boeing 737 that, scarcely six weeks earlier, had been forced by American Navy jets to land in Sicily, to yield to Italian authorities the terrorists who had hijacked the Achille Lauro. The question was how many more planes would be destroyed, and lives lost, before ways are found to control this peculiarly contemporary form of international lawlessness.

Flight 648 had taken off from Athens at 9:06 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, and headed in a southeasterly direction toward Cairo. On board was a typically multinational mix of passengers, including Egyptians returning home from holidays abroad, Greek merchant seamen bound for Port Said to join their ships, a Filipino dance troupe and a scattering of European, Israeli and American tourists. Captain Galal, a 15-year airline veteran, was assisted by a five-member crew.

Twenty-two minutes after takeoff, as the aircraft passed over the Greek island of Milos, a well-dressed young man rose from his seat near the front of the plane, drew a pistol from a plastic bag and pointed it at crew members who were distributing newspapers and magazines. Another man, seated in the rear section, jumped into the aisle and shouted, “Don’t move!” In the cockpit, a third man shoved the barrel of a pistol against the captain’s head. The terrorists in the cabin instructed all passengers to surrender their passports. One of the men was particularly rough. “He was pulling people’s papers out of their pockets and throwing them around and shouting,” Loretana Chafik, an Egyptian passenger, later recalled. “When he got to an Israeli girl, he put his hands all over her. It was horrible.”

At one point the man approached a passenger who turned out to be an Egyptian security agent, Medhat Mustafa Kamal. The agent produced a pistol and shot and killed the hijacker. In the ensuing fire fight, the other hijackers shot and wounded the agent and two stewardesses. Panicked, the passengers dived for cover. The shots pierced the fuselage, causing the plane to lose pressure. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, and Captain Galal began an emergency descent from 35,000 ft. to 14,000 ft. One of the terrorists ordered him to fly to Libya, but Galal convinced him that, with the plane damaged and fuel limited, it was unsafe to attempt to fly farther than Malta. At first the tower at Malta’s Luqa International Airport refused to let the Egyptian airliner land, but authorities relented after Captain Galal told them that he was in imminent danger of crashing into the sea because he was nearly out of fuel. Even so, the runway lights were still off and Galal, with a gun barrel at his head, had to rely on his plane’s landing lights to pierce the darkness as he touched down. The tower ordered him to taxi to a remote parking area; four police buses then blocked both ends of the airstrip.

Describing themselves only as “Egypt’s revolutionaries,” the hijackers threatened to begin killing passengers at regular intervals unless the Maltese agreed to refuel the plane. Meanwhile, in response to an appeal from the pilot, the hijackers agreed to release eleven women, including the seven Filipino dancers and four Egyptians. Then they asked any Israeli women to identify themselves. Thinking she too would be released, Tamar Artzi, 24, rose from her seat. One of the hijackers aimed his pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. At the last second Artzi turned her head; miraculously, the bullet only grazed her cheek. Thinking her dead or mortally wounded, the gunmen threw her out of the plane onto the tarmac.

Her traveling companion, Nitzan Mendelson, 23, was less fortunate. She stayed in her seat when the hijackers began searching for her, but they managed to identify her from her passport photo. With her hands tied, she was dragged to the open doorway, where she too was shot in the head and thrown onto the runway. Beneath the plane, the wounded Artzi crawled toward her friend’s body, but one of the hijackers saw her and shot her in the hip. “They shot us as a sport,” she said later, “as though they were shooting dogs.” Mendelson never regained consciousness, and three days later was pronounced clinically dead.

Next on the neatly stacked pile of passports was that of Patrick Scott Baker, 28, of White Salmon, Wash. Baker remarked later that one hijacker, upon first seeing the young American’s passport, had smiled and said in English, “Welcome.” To himself Baker thought, “Welcome to my nightmare.” Like the Israeli women, Baker was shot in the head and dumped onto the runway. But like Artzi, he received only a superficial wound. He pretended to be dead, waited for the hijackers to go back inside, and then escaped. The next victims were Rogenkamp, a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force in Greece, who was shot and killed, and another American woman, Jackie Pflug, 30, a teacher at the Cairo American College, who was also shot but is expected to recover. Each time the leader of the hijackers shot a passenger, he danced and sang and made jokes to his comrades.

“After the third shooting,” Captain Galal said later, “I was prepared to do anything to prevent more killing.” The terrorists, he added, “were very desperate and bloodthirsty people who would not hesitate to blow up the plane.” Curiously, the request for fuel was the only demand the hijackers made, although they did ask to speak to the Libyan Ambassador, who talked to them from the control tower and shortly thereafter, at the request of his government, left for Libya. Said a Western diplomat in Malta: “The most unusual thing about this is that the hijackers made no political demands or political statements. They just asked for fuel.” One possible explanation for their reticence: they were waiting for instructions from their superiors that never arrived.

In the meantime, the Egyptian government was making plans. Before dawn Sunday, Mubarak dispatched to Malta a C-130 Hercules transport carrying 80 commandos of Egypt’s elite 777 unit. The Maltese, who do not have such a unit, had accepted Mubarak’s offer. According to some reports, U.S. antiterrorist experts were also enroute to Malta but did not arrive before the storming of the plane. Around that time, Mubarak also placed his army on alert and moved additional troops into the Western desert near the Libyan border.

Aboard the 737, the hijackers were growing edgy. The Maltese had previously sent food onto the plane, but decided not to send any more until the nine children among the passengers had been released. This the gunmen refused to do. Galal had to be careful what he said to the tower, because the chief hijacker spoke English. But late in the afternoon, when the hijacker left the cockpit to use the toilet, the captain issued his emphatic call for help. Tony Lyons, an Australian passenger, knew that his passport was next on the pile. “I was resigned to the fact that I was going to be shot,” he said later.

By midmorning the Egyptian C-130 had arrived at Malta’s airport. The authorities ordered it parked in a remote corner, far from the hijacked 737. Finally, at 9:15 p.m. Cairo time Sunday, Mubarak ordered the assault. Five minutes later, six Egyptian commandos, divided into three two-man teams, stormed the plane. Two commandos were ordered to blast their way into the cabin from the baggage compartment, while the other teams were instructed to force their way through the front and rear cabin doors and shoot the hijackers.

Yet in the next 90 seconds the plan to rescue the passengers resulted in the deaths of most of them. As Captain Ibrahim Dahroug entered the plane, a hijacker hurled a grenade at him, severing his leg below the knee. The commandos killed at least one more hijacker in a gun battle. By that time the various explosions caused by the Egyptians’ entry, and probably also by the hijackers’ grenades, had ignited plastic cabin material, thereby releasing toxic fumes. Recalled Lyons: “All of a sudden there were grenades, a lot of shooting, then fire in the fuselage–thick, acrid smoke that choked you when you tried to breathe. I stumbled over people, fell out the door and down the stairs onto the tarmac.”

Within five minutes of the assault a score of captives escaped the inferno, jumping from emergency exits or dropping from the wings. But 57 passengers died, including all nine of the children the hijackers had refused to release. Amid the pandemonium, Captain Galal suddenly found a chance to take personal revenge against the leader of the hijackers, a man who identified himself as “Nabil.” After the commando assault began, said Galal, Nabil hurled a grenade toward the rear of the plane. Realizing he had taken his eyes off Galal, Nabil turned and fired at him. The pilot ducked, and the bullet grazed his head. Seizing a fire ax, Galal felled the terrorist with one swing, then jumped to safety. In the aftermath of the horror of Flight 648, many questions remained unanswered. Were the terrorists, whose trip was indeed believed to have begun in Tripoli, directly linked to Gaddafi? Were they agents of Abu Nidal, the Palestinian renegade who is bent on undermining Mubarak and other Arab moderates? Had they somehow smuggled their weapons onto the plane in Athens, despite what Greek authorities insisted had been five security checks of passengers boarding Flight 648, or had the weapons been taken onto the plane clandestinely in Cairo earlier in the day?

The best and perhaps only hope of answering those questions may lie in the interrogation of the one of two hijackers who survived. One of the men was identified by Maltese authorities as Omar Marzouki, a 20-year-old Tunisian. At week’s end Marzouki was known to be at a hospital in Valletta, recovering from gunshot wounds in the chest and abdomen, and could not be questioned. Although he was under heavy guard, Egyptian security officials feared he might be targeted for assassination by his mysterious mentors. In the meantime the Egyptians requested his extradition, a move that they expected Malta to honor.

Despite the outcome, the Egyptians defended their decision to take action when they did. “We were compelled to do the best we could to save those lives,” declared Osama el Baz, Mubarak’s political adviser. “We had to fight terrorism, and fight it hard.” –By William E. Smith. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Valletta and Dean Fischer/Cairo

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