Smash hit

America is also rehabilitating the Libyan leader after he agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. But it has not given up on punishing the hijackers. Its arrest warrants still stand.

Revenge drove Gadaffi to order the Karachi hijacking. Five months earlier, in April 1986, President Ronald Reagan had sent jets to bomb Tripoli. Gadaffi himself was targeted. Scores died, including his one-year-old adopted daughter.

The American raid was punishment for the Libyan bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which two American servicemen died.

It put Gadaffi into a rage and he ordered the Libyan external intelligence service under his brother-in-law Abdullah Senoussi to retaliate.

According to intelligence sources, a plan was concocted with Gadaffi’s approval to hijack Pan Am flight 73 from Bombay to Frankfurt and New York and blast it out of the sky over Israel in reprisal.

Senoussi hired the services of Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian hitman. Nidal died in Baghdad in 2002, a broken reed. But in the 1980s, when he lived in Libya, his terrorist group was the most feared in the world. Financed by Libya he hired out gunmen to Arab governments to mount attacks on western and Israeli targets.

The terrorists flew to Pakistan and were provided with explosives and guns that had been smuggled in by diplomatic bag. They dressed up as Karachi airport security officers and seized the airliner when it landed on the first leg of its journey from Bombay. Beneath the uniforms, explosives were strapped to their bodies.

The operation went wrong when the American pilot escaped from an emergency exit. The plane was grounded. The hijackers executed an American passenger and dumped his body on the tarmac. After 18 hours trapped inside, the gunmen panicked when the lights failed. They opened fire and hurled grenades at the passengers as Pakistani troops stormed the plane.

All the terrorists were captured on the spot bar one — the Libyan organiser, Salman Ali al-Turki. He went on the run. But when he contacted the Libyan embassy a few days later asking them to contact Senoussi and arrange his escape from Pakistan, he was arrested.

The terrorists refused to break under interrogation so the Pakistani intelligence service concocted a brazen piece of deception. It tricked them into believing Gadaffi was dead by printing a dummy copy of a newspaper with a front page banner headline announcing his sudden demise in a plane crash.

When the paper was delivered to their cells, the terrorists broke down and confessed that the Libyan leader had sponsored their mission. It was no longer necessary to keep his role secret, they said, now that their hero was dead.

At the time of the hijacking, Gadaffi was attending a non-aligned summit in Harare, where he adopted a belligerent anti-American tone. He also planted a clue that gave him away, by boasting that an attack on America was imminent.

This statement, carried by a Libyan news agency, alerted the Pakistanis to Gadaffi’s possible involvement. But without the newspaper ruse they would never have known for sure.

The Karachi hijacking was the first attempt by terrorists to crash an airliner into a city. It failed, but it set a deadly trend.

In 1994, French authorities foiled an attempt by Algerian hijackers to slam a plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Then came the September 11 attacks in 2001. Nobody knows where the bloody trail Gadaffi started all those years ago will end.

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