Air France Flight 8969
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| Summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | December 24, 1994 |
| Type | Hijacking |
| Site | Algiers, Algeria |
| Fatalities | 7 (including the 4 hijackers) |
| Injuries | 13 passengers, 3 members of the crew, 11 members of the GIGN |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | Airbus A300 |
| Operator | Air France |
| Tail number | F-GBEC |
| Passengers | 220 (excluding the hijackers) |
| Crew | 12 |
| Survivors | 217 (excluding the hijackers) |
Air France Flight 8969 (AF8969, AFR8969) was an Air France flight that was hijacked on December 24, 1994 at Algiers. The crisis was ultimately solved with minimal casualties to innocents by the GIGN, the intervention group of the French Gendarmerie, a law-enforcement agency.
Contents |
[edit] The hijacking
On December 24, 1994, at Houari Boumedienne Airport, Algiers, Algeria, four men dressed in Air Algerie uniforms boarded Air France Flight 8969 bound to depart for Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris at 11:15. Immediately the terrorists demanded that the passengers close all of the window shutters and empty their personal belongings into a black plastic bag. Twenty five year old Abdul Abdullah Yahia and three other members of the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé, or GIA) brandished their AK-47, Uzi, automatic weapons and demanded cooperation from the 220 passengers and 12 flight crew.
At 14:00, one of the terrorists discovered that there was an Algerian policeman onboard the flight and quickly brought him to the attention of Terrorist Leader Abdul Abdullah Yahia. The hijackers dragged the passenger up to the front of the passenger compartment and shot him in the back of the head. A few minutes later the hijackers made contact with the control tower at Houari Boumedienne Airport and demanded that the plane be allowed to take off. After their initial request was not met, they dumped the body of the Algerian Police officer onto the runway and stated that if their demands were not immediately met, they would execute another hostage.
Philippe Legorjus, the Chief Security consultant for Air France and former team leader of the GIGN, was on the phone with the Commander of the Algerian Army's commando force, which had the Airbus A300 surrounded. The terrorists wanted the Algerian Army to remove the mobile stairway and tire chocks to allow them to take off, but the Algerians were not going to give in very easily. The crisis management team assembled in Paris at the corporate headquarters of Air France decided that the best choice was to let the plane take off toward France to let the GIGN intervene.
Prime Minister Édouard Balladur asked that the women and children be released in return for letting the aircraft fly to Paris. The GIA agreed to those terms and released 63 passengers. However when the order was given to the Algerian Colonel to have his men remove the staircase and chocks, he refused. The enraged hijackers executed a Vietnamese diplomat and threw his body onto the runway.
The negotiations lasted throughout Christmas Day, but remained at a stalemate between the Algerian Elite Commandos surrounding the aircraft, and the Algerian government and the French government, who wanted a GIGN unit to assist the Algerian Elite Commandos. At 21:30 Christmas night, a young employee of the French Embassy came on the radio and said that the hijackers were going to kill him if they didn't let the plane take off in thirty minutes. Still at a standstill with the Algerian Colonel, the hijackers kept their word and at 22:00 they shot the employee in the head and dumped him out. The GIA stated that they were going to kill one person every half hour until the plane was allowed to fly to Paris.
During the intense standoff, authorities learned that the aircraft was laden with more than twenty sticks of dynamite. Captain Denis Favier of the French GIGN put together a plan to storm the plane and eliminate the terrorists with minimum loss of life. The team trained on an identical French Airbus until they were confident that they could implement their attempts on Flight 8969. After leaving, the Airbus containing the hostage rescue teams flew to Algiers but was not given clearance to land. After circling for more than two hours, the aircraft was diverted to land in Spain to await further instructions.
After nearly forty hours of intense negotiations and the loss of three lives, the Algerian Colonel gave in and removed the mobile staircase and wheel chocks at 02:00 the morning of 26th. The negotiation team decided to divert the flight to Marseille International Airport, some five hundred miles south of Paris. Air traffic controllers in the tower secretly communicated to the crew of Flight 8969 to tell the hijackers that they didn't have enough fuel to make it all the way to Paris. The French forces left Spain and landed just twenty minutes before 8969 touched down at Marseille-Marignane Airport on the coast of France just after 03:30. Tired from the two day stand off, the hijackers maintained radio silence until late morning when the terrorists demand they receive nearly 27 tons of fuel; considerably more than the 9 needed to make the five hundred mile flight to Paris. It was believed that the hijackers wanted as much fuel as possible, making the Airbus into a flying bomb and that the GIA planned to either fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris or blow it up over the city.
[edit] The raid
At 17:08 on the day after Christmas, the commandos were poised along to take the plane, but just then the Airbus began to move on the runway toward the Air Traffic Control Tower. All of the careful positioning done to conceal the GIGN units from being detected had to be altered as the aircraft moved to within thirty meters of the tower.
The commandos were forced to storm the cockpit and first class section, where the majority of the hijackers were accumulated. Suddenly, AK-47 fire erupted from the cockpit of the Airbus, shattering glass in the control tower.
Captain Favier gave the signal and the commandos moved in towards the Airbus on board mobile staircases and catering equipment. Snipers already positioned in the tower began to return fire, being careful not to hit any of the crew in the cockpit. They could not hit any of the terroists in the cockpit as the co-pilot was blocking the line of fire. This problem was solved when he jumped out of the aircraft and ran away. As the mobile staircases reached the right hand door to the first class area, one of the commandos manipulated the hatch's exterior mechanism as bullets struck the thin aluminum exterior of the aircraft.
After the pilots had crouched down in the cabin as far as they could, the commandos tossed stun grenades into the cockpit and first class section and boarded the aircraft. They caught the first hijacker off guard as he was sprinting down the aisle, but the other hijackers in the cockpit area returned a barrage of automatic weapons fire that struck a gendarme in the chest. Suddenly one of the hijackers tossed a grenade down the aisle, as the commandos scrambled to get out of the way and provide cover for the passengers, the device exploded sending shrapnel into the legs of nearly everyone in the first class compartment.
The ensuing firefight injured eleven commandos, thirteen passengers and three members of the crew. The hijackers were all shot dead. The GIGN deployed all of the emergency escape chutes to allow the people to evacuate the aircraft during the firefight that lasted nearly twenty minutes that at last left the four hijackers dead. When all was said and done, all remaining passengers and GIGN members survived.
Video of the raid Note the co-pilot jumping out of the plane's windshield. (he survived without any injury)
[edit] The flight number
Air France Flight 8969 no longer exists. Flight 3543 and 7667 are now used to designate flights between Algiers and Paris.
[edit] See also
- List of accidents and incidents on commercial airliners
- Watch Air Crash Investigation, Season 2, Episode 3: "Hijacked"
[edit] External links
- Meeting Thierry P - Interview with a former GIGN member who was injured during the raid (in French)
- Video of the raid - Video of the GIGN's assault on the plane (INA archives).
