Four die in shoot-out at Orly Airport

Press, 22 May 1978, Page 1

Four die in shoot-out at Orly Airport

NZPA Paris French police and Israeli security agents foiled an attack on passengers of an Israeli airliner at Orly Airport near Paris, shooting dead three gunmen who opened fire with machine-guns in the departure lounge. One French policeman was killed and three policemen and three passengers, all French nationals, were wounded in the 25-minute gun battle on Saturday. The police said the attack was the work of Palestinians and in Beirut a group calling itself the Organisation of the Sons of Lebanon claimed responsibility. Witnesses said that Israeli security men spotted the three gunmen taking machine-guns from satchels in a customs area where passengers bound for Tel Aviv had gathered to board an aircraft of El Al, the Israeli airline. The gunmen, all in their mid-20s had flown in from Tunis earlier in the day, police sources said. French authorities said each carried several sets of conflicting identity papers, including Lebanese passports and Tunisian documents. In Beirut, the Sons of Southern Lebanon issued a communique saying it had planned the shooting in retaliation for Israel’s invasion of Southern Lebanon in March.

The previously unknown group said it chose Paris for its first operation to remind France of its colonial past — a reference to the French mandate in Lebanon which ended in 1943 — and to draw attention to French attempts

to “renew the old colonial systems which show very clearly nowadays in the Western Desert, Chad, and Zaire. . .”

The target of the attack Was “the Israeli enemy who destroyed the villages of our Lebanese South and killed our relatives including women, old men, and children,” it said.

In what appeared to be a veiled reference to French troops of the United Nations interim force in Lebanon, the communique said the organisation would continue fighting "until the liberation of the Lebanese South from Zionists and fascists.”

One of the El Al passengers, who later arrived in Tel Aviv said that when the shooting broke out, “there was panic and people did not know where to go. Everybody rar. in a different direction.”

Mr Yitzhak Amram, comptroller of the Tel Aviv Sheraton Hotel, said: “I did not see very much, but I can tell you it took the French police almost 40 minutes to clear the halls.”

The Israeli Labour Minister (Mr Israel Katz) who would have been on the El Al airliner, said he did not think the attack was directed at him. He was not in the customs hall when the shooting began. The Israeli Minister of Justice (Mr Shmuel Tamir) said he had telephoned the French Minister of Transport to express Israel’s appreciation of the handling of the attack. “Only by co-operation between free countries will it be possible to fight barbaric terrorism,” he said.

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