Air France Flight 8969
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| Summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | December 24, 1994 |
| Type | Hijacking |
| Site | Houari Boumedienne Airport, Algiers, Algeria Marseille Provence Airport, Marseille, France |
| Passengers | 220 (excluding the hijackers) |
| Crew | 12 |
| Injuries | 13 passengers, 3 members of the crew, 11 members of the GIGN |
| Fatalities | 7 (including the 4 hijackers) |
| Survivors | 229 |
| Aircraft type | Airbus A300B2-1C (c/n 104) |
| Operator | Air France |
| Tail number | F-GBEC |
| Flight origin | Houari Boumedienne Airport |
| Destination | Charles De Gaulle International Airport |
Air France Flight 8969 was an Air France flight that was hijacked on December 24, 1994 at Algiers. The crisis was ultimately resolved by the GIGN, the intervention group of the French Gendarmerie, a law-enforcement agency, with minimal casualties to passengers.
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[edit] Hijacking
On December 24, 1994, at Houari Boumedienne Airport, Algiers, Algeria, four armed men dressed as Algerian policemen boarded Air France Flight 8969 bound to depart for Charles De Gaulle Airport, Paris at 11:15. They began inspecting the passengers' passports and demanded that the passengers close all of the window shutters and empty their personal belongings into black plastic bags. After "inspecting", they refused to leave the plane and immediately revealed themselves as not real policemen, but hijackers. Twenty five year old Abdul Abdullah Yahia and the other three members of the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé, or GIA) brandished their AK-47 and Uzi automatic weapons and demanded cooperation from the 220 passengers and 12 flight crew.
At 14:00, one of the hijackers discovered that there was an Algerian policeman onboard the flight and quickly brought him to the attention of 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 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 hijackers 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. A 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 allow the GIGN to intervene.
French Prime Minister Édouard Balladur asked that the women and children be released in return for allowing the aircraft to fly to Paris. The GIA agreed to these 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. An Air France flight attendant on duty at the time later recounted that the hijackers had mistaken him as a "Buddhist with diplomas" instead of a diplomat who happened to be a Buddhist, and he had also angered them by taking several bottles of wine with him when the terrorists summoned him.
The negotiations lasted throughout Christmas Day, but remained at a stalemate between the Algerian elite commandos surrounding the aircraft, and the Algerian and French governments, 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 kill the hijackers with minimum loss of life to the passengers. 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 December 26th. The negotiation team chose to divert the flight to Marseille Provence 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 plane had also used up too much fuel by running its APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) during the standoff in Algiers.
The French special forces left Spain and landed just twenty minutes before 8969 touched down at Marseille, 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 hijackers demand they receive nearly 27 tons of fuel; considerably more than the 9 needed to make the five hundred mile flight to Paris. Intelligence reports suggested that the hijackers intended to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or blow it up over the city; a maximum fuel load would make the Airbus into a flying bomb.
[edit] Raid
At 17:08 on 26 December the commandos were all preparing to assault the plane when it began to move towards 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, at the demand of hijackers, who fired from the Airbus at airport installations including the control tower.
Captain Favier gave the signal and the commandos moved in towards the Airbus on board mobile staircases. Snipers 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 hijackers in the cockpit as the co-pilot was blocking the line of fire. This problem was solved when the co-pilot jumped out of a cockpit window and ran for cover. 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, led by a shooter pair armed with an MP5 9mm and Manurhin MR-73 .357 magnum revolver. They shot and killed the the first hijacker as he was sprinting down the aisle, and wounded another terrorist. However, the other hijackers in the cockpit area returned a barrage of automatic weapons fire that injured several gendarmes, as the AK-47 rounds were powerful enough to shatter the GIGN's orange face shields (which were not proof against rifle ammunition) and dent their flak jacket's steel armour plates. Several GIGN operators suffered hand and finger injuries as their weapons were literally blown out of their hands; the terrorists were well-trained experts who knew where to aim their fire. The GIGN then tried to throw a stun grenade inside, but it exploded outside the aircraft. In retaliation, 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.
As the gun battle raged in first class, the rest of the passengers were being evacuated down the aircraft's emergency escape chutes, deployed by the GIGN.
As the second wave of commandos entered the plane, one of them was injured by a spray of AK-47 bullets, but was quickly dragged to safety. The GIGN's second stun grenade detonated as intended in the cockpit and a second terrorist was killed. Finally, after a long exchange of gunfire in which several more GIGN personnel were wounded, the commandos stopped firing when the trapped pilots in the cockpit shouted to them to stop shooting as those in the cockpit were French. The last two terrorists were found dead on top of the pilots. The explosives had been positioned throughout the plane but had not yet been wired.
The 20-minute fight injured eleven commandos, thirteen passengers and three crew members, but killed only the four hijackers. Several commandos required three-month or longer hospital stays. The damage to the fifteen-year-old aircraft was so severe that it had to be written off.
Air France discontinued the number "Flight 8969" after the hijacking; flights between Algiers and Paris are now Flight 3543 or Flight 7667.
[edit] Dramatization
The incident was featured in the episode Hijacked from the Mayday television series (also known as Air Emergency or Air Crash Investigation) as well as in Zero Hour television series episode Shoot-Out in Marseilles.
A one-hour documentary, episode 3 of the UK BBC2 television series "The Age of Terror" transmitted at 21:00 BST on 29 April 2008, covered this hijacking in depth, and included interviews with passenger, crew, GIGN commando, and government official eyewitnesses, including the co-pilot who jumped out of the cockpit window; it can be viewed on the BBC website for 1 week after transmission. It was stated explicitly that a mole with the GIA terrorists informed the French, but not Algerian, authorities that the intention was to use the aircraft as a missile to attack Paris.
[edit] Nationalites
| Nationality | Passengers | Crew | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
 Algeria |
100 | 0 | 100 |
 France |
75 | 12 | 87 |
 Germany |
10 | 0 | 10 |
 Ireland |
5 | 0 | 5 |
 Netherlands |
3 | 0 | 3 |
 Norway |
5 | 0 | 5 |
 United Kingdom |
5 | 0 | 5 |
 United States |
5 | 0 | 5 |
 Vietnam |
1 | 0 | 1 |
| Total | 209 | 12 | 221 |
[edit] See also
- List of accidents and incidents on commercial airliners
- Singapore Airlines Flight 117, similar hijacking which resulted in a storming of the aircraft.
[edit] External links
- Meeting Thierry P - Interview with a former GIGN member who was injured during the raid (in French)
- Video of the raid with commentary
- Video of the raid - Video of the GIGN's assault on the plane (INA archives).
- Video of the raid - no soundtrack
- Pre-hijack photos taken from Airliners.net
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