Hijackers murder pilot, give new deadline in Somalia

Press, 18 October 1977, Page 1

Hijackers murder pilot, give new deadline in Somalia

NZPA Mogadishu, Somalia Four Arab and German hijackers shot and killed the pilot of a hijacked West German jetliner at 3 a.m. (N.Z. time) yesterday.

He had been forced to fly his plane and 86 hostages from South Yemen to Somalia, the West German embassy in Mogadishu said, United Press International reported. The terrorists then issued a new deadline of 10 a.in. (2 a.m. N.Z. time today) vowing to kill their remaining hostages and blow up the Boeing 737 unless 13 comrades are freed from West German and Turkish prisons and a 515.5 M ransom was paid. Somali soldiers immediately surrounded the Lufthansa jet after it touched down at Mogadishu Airport, a West German Embassy spokesman said. The hijackers then radioed the Mogadishu control tower to send someone to remove the body of Captain Schumann, aged 37. The embassy spokesman said the body was taken away to a hospital by Somali police. After the body was removed from the plane, the hijackers broke off communications with the tower where West German officials had gone to negotiate with them. Somalia is the sixth country in which the terrorists have landed since they hijacked the plane over the Mediterranean Sea last Thursday.

In Bonn the West German Chancellor (Mr Schmidt) called an emergency crisis staff meeting upon hearing the report of the Lufthansa pilot’s death. A California woman with a heart condition, Christine Santiago, and her five-year-old son, Leo, were among the 82 passengers and five crew members held captive aboard the aircraft since mid-day on Thursday. The hijackers have been linked to the kidnappers of the West German industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, abducted six weeks ago. Dr Schleyer’s fate is still unknown. Somali police had ararrived at the airport and appeared to be in control, the spokesman said. There was no sign of any other Government officials. The hijackers forced the plane to fly to Mogadishu after leaving Aden, South Yemen, where authorities refused to negotiate and ordered the plane refueled for take-off. Somalia, which also has a Marxist regime, had initially refused to let the short-range Boeing 737 land because of what it described as a long-standing policy to oppose inter- 1 national terrorism. The airliner, commandeered by the hijackers on a flight from Majorca, Spain, to Frankfurt, West

Germany, first landed in Rome, continued on to Cyprus and then flew to the tiny Persian Gulf States of Bahrain and Dubai. It landed in South Yemen on Sunday. The twinjet aircraft had taken off from Aden, capital of South Yemen, early yesterday. Like South Yemen, Somalia is one of three countries the hijackers named as destinations for 13 terrorists they wanted West Germany to fly out from German and Turkish jails. The third country is Vietnam. Bonn Government sources earlier said all three countries have refused to accept the 11 German prisoners and two Palestinians held in Turkey. West Germany has ignored two deadlines for flying out the prisoners. Captain Juergen Schumann was shot to death in front of the other hostages, the West German news agency, D.P.A., reported from " Bonn, because the terrorists apparently feared he no longer would obey their orders. The Somali news agency, Sonna, said that soon after the jet landed “the dead body of the pilot was slid down from the plane and taken to a hospital. He had been shot to death.”

The West German Government’s special envoy for negotiations with the hijackers arrived in the Saudi Arabian Red Sea port of Jeddah, Government sources in Bonn said yesterday. The envoy, Chancellery State Secretary HansJuergen Wischnewski, flew there on a special flight from Dubai where he had vainly tried to persuade the hijackers to free their hostages. When the hijacked aircraft took off from Dubai, Mr Wischnewski’s plane followed it but was refused permission to land at Aden where the Lufthansa flight made a fuelling stop. The United Arab Emirates will prevent any hijacked aircraft from landing in its airports in future, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktum was quoted as saying in Abu Dhabi yesterday. Sheikh Mohammed, the U.A.E. Defence Minister who led the Government side in negotiations w'*'" the hijackers, said tu? U.A.E. was against all kinds of hijacking. “No hijacked aircraft will in future be allowed to land in any of the U.A.E.’s airports whatever the circumstances,” he said.