Raid
Without warning, around an hour and a half before the planned time of the raid, the Egyptian commandos attacked the passenger doors and the luggage compartment doors with explosives. Prime Minister Mifsud Bonnici claimed that these unauthorized explosions caused the internal plastic of the plane to catch fire, causing widespread suffocation. On the other hand, the Times of Malta, quoting sources at the airport on the day, held that when the hijackers realized that they were being attacked, they lobbed hand grenades into the passenger area, killing people and starting the fire aboard. Both the Egyptian explosives and the hijackers' grenades could have been responsible for the fire and deaths.
The storming of the aircraft killed 56 out of the remaining 88 passengers, two crew members and one terrorist. Only one terrorist — Omar Rezaq, who had survived — still remained undetected by the Maltese government. The terrorist leader, who was injured during the storming of the aircraft, had got rid of his hood and ammunition and pretended to be an injured passenger. Egyptian commandos tracked Rezaq to St. Luke's General Hospital and, holding the doctors and medical staff at gunpoint, entered the casualty ward looking for him. He was arrested when some of the passengers in the hospital recognized him.
A total of 58 out of the 90 passengers had died by the time the crisis was over.
Rezaq was put on trial in Malta, yet with no anti-terror legislation, he was tried on other charges. There was widespread fear that terrorists would hijack a Maltese plane or carry out a terror attack in Malta as an act of retribution. Rezaq was given a 25-year sentence, of which he served eight. His release caused a diplomatic incident between Malta and the U.S. because Maltese law strictly prohibited trying a person twice, in any jurisdiction, on charges connected to the same series of events (having wider limitations compared to classic double jeopardy). Following his immediate expulsion on release, he was nevertheless captured on arrival in Nigeria. After three months he was handed over to the U.S., brought before a U.S. court and, on October 7, 1996, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a no-parole recommendation.
Read more about this topic: EgyptAir Flight 648
Famous quotes containing the word raid:
“Each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)