1985 – Struggling Party of God: Terrorized West and US ramping up of Anti-Libya propaganda

1985 – Struggling Party of God: Terrorized West and US ramping up of Anti-Libya propaganda

Continued from '1984 – Year of the Volcano: The plot to overthrow Qaddafi and make the appearance of Libyan Terror Cells in Europe'

The following explanations are based on several books, newspaper archives, mainstream and foreign news websites, independent blogs, video documentaries and television news reports including other limited sources in English and other languages and official.

By Thermal Detonator and co-written and edited by Sean Russell (March 9, 2021)

 As I mentioned in my previous article, “1984 – Year of the Volcano”, when I made this blog several years ago, the intention was to keep it 9/11 oriented. However, as we continue now from 1984 into 1985 and beyond, recall my 2016 article “Nineteen 9/11 Hijackers: Dead or Alive? – The curious case of Ziad al-Jarrah, The Hamburg Cell & Shanksville pt3” and the peculiar Jarrah family connections spanning decades before 9/11 and stretching from West Germany to Lebanon. By 1985, the now infamous Shia Islamist Hezbollah, the “Party of God”, had emerged as the most prominent and uncompromising anti-western “Islamic Jihad” group in Lebanon. So notice here even early reports after 9/11 that investigators or pentagon propagandists have seemingly gone “back in time” to retroactively implicate Imad Mughniyeh.  

A convenient way to get to know about Hezbollah with CNN’s Mike Boettcher on September 14, 2001, 4:17pm covering Mughniyeh alongside Egyptian Islamic Jihad and what will come to be familiar as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Plus the mysterious figure documented by world-renowned author Peter Lance, the Triple Spy, who was a former junior officer in the US Army and linked to 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirator El Sayyid Nosair. Yet in the CNN reports it seems to indicate Mohamed confessing to OBL meeting with Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh in Sudan.

Since this report no such Mughniyeh link has ever been proven, because as for Ali Mohamed who’s still incarcerated, the location has been kept secret from the public due in October 2001 reports to a consequence of 9/11; that he may have been cooperating with the US government. And according to former FBI agent Ali Soufan in 2012, Soufan confirmed that Ali is still awaiting sentencing.

And there is one other major detail wrong about Mike Boettcher’s report on Mughniyeh. When he stated “In fact, only one picture in the last 21 years exists of Imad Mughniyeh”, as even with the later CNN report at 10:12 p.m. showing a silhouette representing him. Well this is completely inaccurate:

On the Time Magazine cover from July 3rd 1985, the hijacking of Trans World Airlines Flight 847, clearly depicted is Captain Pilot John Testrake with Imad Mughniyeh sitting behind him; pistol in hand, arms sticking out the plane’s front window.

1985

Royal Jordanian Flight 402

But the audacious attempts by military-industrial complex propagandists to try to equate Hezbollah as part of al-Qaeda, or being a direct conspirator in the 9/11 attacks didn’t stop here. On October 10, 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, three of the alleged hijackers, Imad Mugniyah, Ali Atwa, and Hassan Izz-Al-Din, having been earlier indicted in United States district courts for the 1985 hijacking of an American airliner, were among the original 22 fugitives announced by President George W. Bush to be placed on the newly formed FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list. Rewards of $5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Atwa and Izz-Al-Din are still being offered by the United States.

But before TWA Flight 847, on June 11, 1985, what we know today as Hezbollah hijacked Royal Jordanian Flight 402 which had carried 70 people including at least four American nationals on board. The Jordanian airliner was sitting on the tarmac at Beirut International Airport when it was stormed by a team of six Amal militiamen led by Fawaz Younis. The conspirators assaulted and severely beat several Jordanian sky marshals that were discovered among the passengers.

The hijackers forced the flight crew to reveal the identities of the sky marshals to disable them and forced the plane to Tunis. Due to fuel shortage, the flight was diverted to Larnaca, Cyprus. After refueling in Cyprus, the hijackers ordered the plane flown to Tunis, where they wanted to read a statement demanding that Palestinians be removed from Lebanon. Tunisian authorities blocked the runways with trucks and permission to land at Tunis was refused, so the flight diverted to Palermo. After refueling there, the aircraft was flown back to Beirut.

Summoned by Amal’s military commander, Younis was ordered to seize the Jordanian plane and fly it to Tunis, where the Arab League was meeting, to demand that all Palestinians be removed from Lebanon. Shiite militiamen and Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas returning to Lebanon were, at the time, engaged in fierce battles.  The hijacking was widely seen as an expression of Shiite anger over a resolution adopted that week at the Arab League meeting. The resolution called for an immediate cease-fire in and around Palestinian districts besieged by Shiite militiamen on the ouktskirts of Beirut and for the withdrawal of the Shiites.

In the early morning of June 12, the aircraft took off again, but returned again after two hours. After the 13-hour siege, the hijackers released the 70 passengers and blew up the plane. Fawaz Younis appeared on television as a spokesman for the hijackers.

The Royal Jordanian plane was destroyed by explosives and gunfire on the ground at Beirut Airport as the hijackers escaped. The aircraft’s passengers and the Swedish captain, Ulf Sultan, had been freed moments earlier. The 30-hour hijacking was among the briefest and least bloody acts of Middle East sky piracy, but that’s not exactly the circumstance of what happens a few days later. 

TWA Flight 847

On the morning of June 14, 1985, Flight 847 was hijacked shortly after takeoff from Athens. It was a flight from Cairo to San Diego with en route stops in Athens, Rome, Boston, and Los Angeles. The flight was uneventful from Cairo to Athens, but a new crew had boarded there which was Captain John Testrake, First Officer Phil Maresca, Flight Engineer Christian Zimmerman, flight service manager Uli Derickson, and flight attendants Judy Cox, Hazel Hesp, Elizabeth Howes, and Helen Sheahan.

At 10:10, Flight 847 departed Athens for Rome. It was commandeered shortly after by two Arabic-speaking Lebanese men who had smuggled a pistol and two grenades through the Athens airport security, and had demanded the release of 700 Shi’ite Muslims from Israeli custody, and who would take the plane repeatedly to Beirut and Algiers.

Although it was first reported that Islamic Jihad had hijacked TWA 847, a supposed group under the same name that had taken credit in previous attacks on Americans in Lebanon, one of the hijackers was later identified as Mohammed Ali Hamadei, who later becomes an alleged member of Hezbollah.

The passengers and crew endured a three-day intercontinental ordeal. Some passengers were threatened and some beaten. Passengers with Jewish-sounding names were moved apart from the others. Passenger Robert Stethem, who was a U.S. Navy diver, at one point got into a verbal altercation with one of the hijackers and was beaten then shot right in the temple, his body dumped out of the plane onto the ramp and shot again. Dozens of passengers were held hostage over the next two weeks until released by their captors after some of their demands were met.

With Captain Testrake being held at gunpoint in airspace over Greece, the plane was diverted from its original destination of Rome to the Middle East and made its first stop, for several hours, at the Beirut International Airport in Lebanon, where 19 passengers were allowed to leave in exchange for fuel.

Nearly a dozen well-armed men joined the hijackers before the plane returned to Algiers the following day, June 15, where an additional 65 passengers and all five female cabin crew members were released. The hijackers wanted to fly to Tehran, but mysteriously returned to Beirut for a third time on the afternoon of June 16, and remained there for unknown reasons.

The initial demands of the hijackers included:

  • Release of the “Kuwait 17”, those involved in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kuwait
  • Release of all 766 mainly Lebanese Shias transferred to Israel’s Atleat Prison in conjunction with immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon
  • International condemnation of Israel and the United States

The Greek government released the accomplice, Ali Atwa. In exchange, the hijackers released eight Greek citizens to be flown by a Greek government business jet from Algiers back to Athens. Incidentally, those released would include Greek pop singer Demis Roussos, who was a passenger hostage.

By the afternoon of June 17, the 40 remaining hostages had been taken from the plane to be held throughout Beirut by Hezbollah. Nabih Berri was the chief of the Amal militia and the minister of justice in the fractured Lebanon cabinet. Interestingly, in 1974, after Berri had practiced law for a time in Beirut he changed political affiliation, following the charismatic religious leader al-Sayyid Musa al-Sadr. Berri played only a minor role in al-Sadr’s movement, and the onset of civil war in 1975 somewhat eclipsed that movement. But Berri himself had also lived in the United States. He briefly resided in Dearborn Michigan and is said to come there at least once a year to visit his family, of which several of them owned businesses throughout the Lebanese neighborhoods within the city’s large Arab community often within the auto service industry in which Berri himself was known to have been a gas station owner previously. Basically throughout the TWA 847 ordeal, he became the power broker and as even Los Angeles Times had reported during the time of the hostage crisis, his extended family and Michigan had mixed feelings about him in the whole situation.

One of the hostages was released when he developed heart trouble. The other 39 remained captive until intervention by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, with Lebanese officials on June 30th when they and the pilots held captive on the airplane were collected in a local schoolyard and met with international journalists, then driven to Syria by the International Red Cross to the Sheraton Hotel and a press conference in Damascus.

The hostages then boarded a cargo plane and flew to West Germany where they were met by U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush, debriefed and given medical examinations, then flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and welcomed home by the president. Over the next several weeks Israel released over 700 Shia prisoners, while maintaining that the prisoners’ release was not related to the hijacking.

The United States indicted Imad Mughniyeh and his collaborator, Hassan Izz al-Din for the hijacking of TWA 847, in which he tortured and murdered Robert Stethem. Mughniyeh and his men allegedly tortured Stethem for hours, before killing him and dumping his body onto the airport tarmac.

Mughniyeh was the founding member of Lebanon’s ‘Islamic Jihad Organization’ and became number two in Hezbollah’s leadership. Unlike Fawaz Younis coming from the Amal faction, Mughniyeh and his cousin Mustafa Badr Al Din had become active in the Palestinian Fatah movement at an early age.

But just to give a little brief background since he is regarded as a major figure on a global scale, in the mid-1970s Mugniyeh organized a Student Brigade which became part of Yasser Arafat’s elite Force 17. Mughniyeh temporarily left Fatah in 1981 due to differences of opinion on the regime of Saddam Hussein, in the suspicion of eliminating favorable religious leaders as well as changing alliances among different Shiite groups in Lebanon. He was a student in the engineering department at the American University of Beirut in 1981 when the United States gave the “green light” for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organization. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Mughniyeh rejoined Fatah and participated in the defense of West Beirut, where he was wounded in the fighting. After the withdrawal of PLO forces from Beirut in September 1982 he remained a Fatah member, but also worked with other factions such as the Islamic resistance groups and the leftist Lebanese National Movement until 1984 when Mughniyeh joined the newly created Islamic Resistance of Hezbollah. Mughniyeh also remained close to Fatah leader Khalil al-Wazir (aka Abu Jihad), Arafat’s right-hand man, until Wazir’s death in 1988.

Continuing though with the other participants of TWA 847, among the nearly dozen well-armed men who joined the hijackers on the 15th was Fawaz Younis, officially making him the only criminal to ever pull off two successful hijackings.

Later Western analysis considered them all members of the Hezbollah militant group, but Hezbollah rejects that conclusion.

Two years later, Mohammed Ali Hamadei was arrested in Frankfurt, West Germany while attempting to smuggle liquid explosives. The United States requested his extradition but Hezbollah immediately abducted two West Germans in Beirut, threatening to kill them if Hamadei was handed over. It was decided to try Hamadei in West Germany. In addition to the charges in West Germany, he was also charged for the 1985 hijacking and hostage taking, and tried and convicted of Stethem’s 1985 murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, which included a provision delaying his first parole view  to be later than the normal 15 years. The Landgericht (regional court) Kleve granted Hamadei’s application for parole on November 30, 2005, after serving 19 years of his term. The U.S. government has sought his extradition from Lebanon. Hamadei’s indicted accomplices in the TWA Flight 847 attack, Hassan Izz-Al-Din and Ali Atwa continue to elude arrest and currently remain at large, having been placed among the original 22 fugitives on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list on October 10, 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

80’s Contra-dictions

It is worth mentioning there are other terrorist organizations carrying out similar or contrasting type hijackings particularly this year and the following, almost a seasoned part of that decade in the mid ’80s, though none of that is important yet.

But the basic history as far as what happens around this time with the Contra affair before any of the congressional hearings the following year in 1987 is this:

The indictment of Hezbollah members is a forward move by the Neocon infested Bush Administration already daring to play any viable pretext option it can to equate Lebanon as a state sponsor of Al-Qaeda.

And of course, when most anti-Bush critics only looked at the doppelganger or duopoly effect with the conflicts in Iraq (Desert Storm/2003 invasion of Iraq) and targeting Saddam between the Bush Dynasty/monarchy as sort of the son taking on the father’s revenge, as putting Hezbollah on the most wanted list after 9/11 could have seemed as if Bush Jr. was in either damage control or revenge mode over the Iran-Contra scandal, as no one was considering how much of Bush Sr. was really pulling the strings in the Reagan Administration, nor especially his behind the scenes war with Israel.

But eventually, things started to take shape in 1985 when CIA pilot whistle-blower Barry Seal (whose frequent drop off point was Mena, Arkansas) is found dead in his car of an apparent assassination, when it’s also said he had the personal phone number of George H.W. Bush in his possessions.

And simultaneously as the CIA is heavily involved in drug trafficking in Central and South America, on the brink of the Iran-Contra scandal exploding the following year, 1985 became a year riddled with terrorist attacks around the world and especially in Europe as one can see within a program of events in an attempt to remove Gaddafi from power in Libya detailed in my previous article, but there were many more other terrorist attacks during that time and after, which were often anti-us revolutionary cases of secular Arab terrorist and International Marxist groups striking American tourists abroad.

But from this point on, Hezbollah is not charged for any terrorism against westerners or on Western targets, especially the United States. The only other thing they become suspected in is the 1992 Israeli Embassy attack in Buenos Aires. But during the height of the Lebanese Civil War, there were 104 kidnappings of foreigners held as hostages between 1982 and 1992, known as the Lebanon hostage crisis. Aside from the passengers of TWA 847, there were 17 other foreigners also kidnapped in Lebanon by Hezbollah or loosely associated groups in 1985.

But hey, who cared about a second Reagan administration, United States foreign policy, or International Terrorism in the 1985 when there was such delectable and distracting entertainment being served on television such as MTV. Our attention fixed on the superficial and mythic likes of Wrestlemania and Super Mario Brothers, the American public could still feel as if they were conscious and active by tuning in to We Are the World and Live Aid. And if we did emerge from our television boxes there were so many shopping malls, video arcades, and movie theaters to look forward to.

One movie released in 1985 which should be brought to attention is the now 1980s novelty cult classic ‘Back to the Future’, starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. As you may recall the scene where Fox’s character, Marty, is forced to escape in the DeLorean Time Machine because the inventor Doc Brown (Lloyd) who was supposed to take the first experimental trip through the time machine, is shot and killed by “Libyan nationalist” terrorists over what he still owes them for the plutonium he stole from them that’s used to fuel his time machine.

At that time within the American lexicon, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was being dressed up as the new Arab villain, replacing Iran’s Khomeini.

Gaddafi was especially critical of the US due to its support of Israel, and sided with the Palestinians in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, viewing the 1948 creation of the State of Israel as a Western colonial occupation forced upon the Arab world. He believed that Palestinian violence against Israeli and Western targets was the justified response of an oppressed people who were fighting against the colonization of their homeland. Calling on the Arab states to wage “continuous war” against Israel, in 1970 he initiated a Jihad Fund to finance anti-Israeli militants. In June 1972 Gaddafi created the First Nasserite Volunteers Centre to train anti-Israeli guerrillas.

Gaddafi favored Yasser Arafat’s Fatah over the more militant and Marxist Palestinian groups, but as years progressed, Gaddafi’s relationship with Arafat became strained; he considered Arafat too moderate and called for more violent action.

Instead, he supported militias like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, As-Sa’iqa, and the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front. He funded the Black September Organization whose members perpetrated the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes in West Germany and had the killed militants’ bodies flown to Libya for a hero’s funeral, as well as three of its surviving members who held a press conference there, all of it being brokered by way of a Lufthansa jet hijacked by two Black September members 8 weeks after the massacre, and demanded the release of the three jailed Fedayeen Munich survivors.

So clearly it was easy to dub Libya as a rogue state with a variety to state-sponsored terrorism, just as easy as Jordan, Lebanon and Syria were easily categorized.

The early and mid-1980s saw economic trouble for Libya; from 1982 to 1986, the country’s annual oil revenues dropped from $21 billion to $5.4 billion. Focusing on irrigation projects, 1983 saw construction start on Libya’s largest and most expensive infrastructure project, the Great Man-Made River; it remained incomplete at the start of the 21st century. Military spending increased, while other administrative budgets were cut back.

Once Ronald Reagan was first elected president in 1981 he pursued a hard-line approach to Libya, claiming it to be a puppet regime of the Soviet Union. In turn, Gaddafi played up his commercial relationship with the Soviets, revisiting Moscow in 1981 and 1985, and threatening to join the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets were nevertheless cautious of Gaddafi, seeing him as an unpredictable extremist.

In August 1981, the United States staged military exercises in the Gulf of Sirte – an area which Libya claimed as a part of its territorial waters. The U.S. shot down two Libyan Su-22 planes which were on an intercept course. Closing down Libya’s embassy in Washington, DC, Reagan advised U.S. companies operating in Libya to reduce the number of American personnel stationed there. In March 1982, the U.S. implemented an embargo of Libyan oil.

As a consequence with the shoot-downs, Ronald Reagan who had just survived an assassination attempt in March earlier that year had received warnings in August 1981 from his intelligence Chiefs that Qaddafi plotted to assassinate him.

But Libya’s foreign debt rose and in August 1985 there was a mass deportation of foreign workers, most of them Egyptian and Tunisian. Domestic threats continued to plague Gaddafi; in May 1984,his Bab al-Azizia home was unsuccessfully attacked by a militia— as explained in the previous article, linked either to the NFSL or the Muslim Brotherhood—and in the aftermath, 5,000 dissidents were arrested.

EgyptAir Flight 648

But continuing on with more hijackings in Greece. On November 23, 1985, EgyptAir Flight 648, a regularly scheduled flight between Athens Ellinikon International Airport and Cairo International Airport in Egypt departed at 8 pm and was hijacked ten minutes after takeoff as the aircraft was at cruising height of 33,000 feet by 3 heavily armed members of the Abu Nidal Organization. The 3 young men, brandishing guns and grenades, had boarded with Tunisian and Moroccan passports, calling themselves the Egypt Revolution.

Omar Marzouki Rezaq (Lebanese-Palestinian descent, age 22), Nar Al-Din Bou Said Muhammad (age 23), and Salem Chakore Salah (age 25), got out of their seats and took over the aircraft. The terrorist leader, Rezaq, immediately went into the cockpit. Bou Said sat towards the back of the aircraft, and Chakore took to the front of the plane. Chakore immediately went about calling the 89 passengers forward, frisking them, and sorting them according to their nationalities.

Rezaq searched uniformed staff and found a gun on one of them, Ashraf Ibrahim. Proceeding to check all passports, the hijackers identified another security man, Hassan el-Sherstavi, and the two were handcuffed.  However, two other air marshals were not detected. One of them, Medhat Kamel, lost his temper and opened fire on Chakore, but his other shots hit two flight attendants. Eventually Rezaq managed to shoot Kamel in the back. Seeing the death of his partner, the fourth air marshal, Nabil Farouk, surrendered.

At least twenty-seven shots were fired. Hani Galal, the captain of the plane, began descending in an attempt to slow cabin decompression on the damaged plane. The terrorists demand that captain Galal fly to Libya or Tunisia. The captain refused, arguing that at low altitude the machine’s fuel was not sufficient for this because the switching system that controls the depletion of the fuel tanks had been damaged during the shooting. In the exchange of fire the fuselage had been punctured, causing a rapid depressurization. The aircraft was forced to descend to 14,000 feet (4,300 m) to allow the crew and passengers to breathe.

Due to this, Malta was chosen as a more suitable option. While approaching Malta the aircraft was running dangerously low on fuel, experiencing serious pressurization problems, as well as carrying wounded passengers.

However, Maltese authorities did not give permission for the aircraft to land; the Maltese government had previously refused permission for other hijacked aircraft to land there, but they would become optimistic that they could solve the crisis. The insistent hijackers forced the pilot to land at Luqa Airport in Malta. As a last-ditch attempt to stop the landing, the runway lights were switched off, but captain Galal managed to land the damaged aircraft safely.

The Maltese Prime Minister, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, rushed to the airport’s control tower and assumed responsibility for the negotiations. Aided by an interpreter, he refused to refuel the aircraft, or to withdraw Maltese armed forces which had surrounded the plane, until all passengers were released.

Eleven passengers and two injured flight attendants were allowed off the plane. The hijackers then started shooting hostages, starting with Tamar Artzi, an Israeli woman. Artzi was shot in the head and back, though amazingly survived her wounds. The chief hijacker Rezaq threatened to kill a passenger every 15 minutes until his demands were met. His next victim was Nitzan Mendelson, another Israeli woman, who died. He then shot three Americans: Patrick Scott Baker, Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp and Jackie Nink Pflug. Of the five passengers shot, Artzi, Baker and Pflug survived; Mendelson died in a Maltese hospital a week after the hijacking. A British passenger commented he had seen that Rezaq had to raise his gun in order to shoot Baker, who was about 6′ 5″ tall.

Without proof, U.S. and Egyptian authorities were already publicly suspecting Libya and Muammar Gaddafi was behind the hijacking.

France, the UK and U.S. all offered to send anti-hijack forces to Malta. Prime Minister Bonnici was under heavy pressure from both the hijackers and from the U.S. and Egypt, whose ambassadors were at the airport. The non-aligned Maltese government feared that the Americans or the Israelis would arrive and take control of the scene, as the U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella was only 20 minutes away.

When the U.S. told Maltese authorities that Egypt had a special forces counterterrorism team trained by the U.S. Delta Force ready to move in, they were granted permission to dispatch. The Egyptian Unit 777 under the command of Major-General Kamal Attia was flown in, led by four American officers. Negotiations were prolonged as much as possible and it was agreed that the plane should be attacked on the morning of November 25th, when food was to be taken into the aircraft. Soldiers dressed as caterers would jam the door open and attack.

Without warning, Egyptian commandos launched the raid about an hour and a half before it had been originally planned. They blasted open the passenger and luggage compartment doors with explosives. Bonnici claimed that these unauthorized explosions caused the internal plastic of the plane to catch fire, causing widespread suffocation. However, the Times of Malta, quoting sources at the airport on the day, held that when the hijackers realized that they were being attacked, they lobbed hand grenades into the passenger area, killing people and starting the fire.

During the chaos that followed hijacker Bou Said was bludgeoned to death by captain Galal with a fire axe. The flight crew already knew the terrorists were insane and on a suicide mission, because they would sing and dance and drink coffee every time after they had individually shot passengers during negotiations, in which throughout the whole ordeal the terrorists were only demanding fuel and nothing else.

The Egyptian commandos’ storming of the aircraft and the firefight which ensued resulted in the deaths of 54 of the remaining 87 passengers, as well as two crew members and one hijacker. Only one hijacker — Rezaq, who had survived — remained undetected by the Maltese government. The terrorist leader, injured during the storming of the aircraft, had removed his hood and ammunition, pretending to be an injured passenger. Egyptian commandos tracked Rezaq to St. Luke’s General Hospital and, holding the doctors and medical staff at gunpoint, entered the casualty ward looking for him. He was arrested after some of the passengers in the hospital recognized him.

58 of the 95 passengers and crew had died, as well as two of the three hijackers by the time the crisis had ended. It marked the end of a 24-hour ordeal that resulted in a bloody massacre with 62 people dead. Maltese medical examiners estimated that eight passengers were shot dead by the commandos.

Early reports during the raid had originally misreported that there were 5 hijackers involved in Flight 638 because Egyptian Commandos mistakenly shot several unidentified passengers who had lunged from the plane in the belief that they were additional terrorists.

Ultimately, the Egyptian Commandos had made the trauma even worse, having killed more passengers than the terrorists did combined. Rezaq faced trial in Malta, but with no anti-terrorism legislation he was tried on other charges. There was widespread fear that terrorists would hijack a Maltese plane or carry out a terrorist attack in Malta as an act of retribution. Rezaq received a 25-year sentence, of which he served eight. The whole story of the incident and Rezaq’s capture by US authorities after being freed have been documented in 2016 on CNN’s Declassified: Untold Stories Of American Spies Hijacked: Terror In The Sky-Egyptair Flight 648.

Unlike the events of TWA Flight 847, the raid on Flight 648 by Egyptian troops resulted in dozens of deaths, making the hijacking one of the deadliest such incidents in history. I can certainly say in comparison that in the mid-80’s I’d rather be hijacked by Hezbollah than the Abu Nidal Organization, the group which claimed responsibility for the hijacking of Flight 648.

Abu Nidal was the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council, a militant Palestinian splinter group also known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). Nidal is also said to have been original member of the Black September and had played some distant role in the 1972 Munich Massacre. He formed his group in October 1974 after splitting from Fatah, the faction of the PLO led by Yassir Arafat, who Nidal had sworn to kill and organized several assassination attempts on. Acting basically as a freelance contractor, Nidal eventually expanded ANO membership beyond just Palestinians, networking extensively with similar and likeminded groups. And at this point in time, Abu Nidal’s main base of operations was in Syria, home of president Hafez al-Assad who shared Nidal’s hated for Arafat and allowed displaced and rejectionist Palestinians and other competing PLO splinter groups and their leaders to harbor there, opposing Arafat as a sworn enemy.

On the eve of the old Empire – Rome and Vienna Airport Massacres

Yet as 1986 draws near, another terrifying and gruesome incident occurred. On December 27th 1985, seven Arab terrorists attacked two airports in Rome, Italy, and Vienna, Austria with assault rifles and hand grenades. In all, the two strikes killed 19, including a child, and wounded around 140, before four of the terrorists were killed by Israeli El Al Airlines Security personnel and local police, who captured the remaining three.

Some contemporary reports claimed the gunmen originally intended to hijack El Al jets at the airports and blow them up over Tel Aviv; others concluded that the attack on waiting passengers was the original plan and that the Frankfurt airport was meant to be hit as well.

The attacks were first blamed on the PLO, but Arafat denied the accusations and denounced the strikes. The PLO asserted rather that the attacks were intended to force Italy and Austria into severing ties with the Palestinians.

On December 30th the head of Italian military intelligence said that four of the terrorists at the Rome Airport had been trained in Iran and entered Italy by way of Syria.

Hurling Bulgarian-made hand grenades into the early morning crowds and then opening fire with Kalachnikov assault rifles manufactured in Poland, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, Libya was still accused by the US of funding the terrorists who carried out the attacks without any proof.  Although Libya denied the charges, Qaddafi still praised the attacks, and the US relied on published reports by alleged sources close to the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal that Libyan intelligence supplied the weapons and the ANO’s head of the Intelligence Directorate’s Committee for Special Missions, Dr. Ghassan al-Ali, organized the attacks.

Libya denied these charges as well, notwithstanding that it claimed they were “heroic operations carried out by the sons of the martyrs of Sabra and Shatila.” Later it become known that three Palestinian gunmen at the Rome airport were refugees from the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon.

On December 30th 1985, a West German newspaper, Bild am Sonntag, noted for sensationalism as well as for its access to reliable intelligence sources, citing West German and Israeli intelligence sources said the attacks were the result of a pact between Muammar Qaddafi and Abu Nidal.  The report in Bild said the teams that carried out the attacks emerged from an agreement between the Libyan leader and Nidal to carry out a string of similar attacks throughout the world. The newspaper said the pact was forged at a meeting of the two men at a Libyan coastal resort, at which Colonel Qaddafi agreed to pay $12.7 million a year for several years to train Palestinian terrorists loyal to Abu Nidal in camps in Libya and Yemen. But of course as what we’ve learned since September 2001, you obviously can’t be dependent on Mossad for reliable intel when it comes to any proposed suspects meeting with Middle Eastern leaders or officials.

Responsibility for the dual attacks was later claimed by the Abu Nidal Organization in retaliation for Operation Wooden Leg, the Israeli bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunis on October 1, 1985.

But when it came to where the airport attacks happened, the authorities there who had control of the entire investigations came to a completely different conclusion than what U.S. authorities were impatiently instigating. The UK press as well as the Italian secret services blamed Syria and Iran.

All the terrorist group members had used Moroccan and Tunisian passports, and said they had entered through Rome from Tunisia. They all stated they were members of Al Fatah, Fatah Revolutionary Council, Black June, and Al Assifa. . . All names used by or associated with Abu Nidal.

All the terrorist group members have used Moroccan and Tunisian passports, and said they had entered through Rome from Tunisia. They all stated they were members of; Al Fatah, FRC, Black June Revolutionary Council, Al Assifa. . . All of it being linked to or Abu Nidal names.

The Rome attack was carried out by Syrian Mahmoud Ibrahim Khaled, Palestinian Mohammed Sharam, and Algerian Tigriwi Abbegren who was killed in a shoot-out with the Police. Sharam was shot and taken by ambulance, still conscious enough to make some statements and answer questions to reporters, but later died of his bullet wounds in hospital. A note found in the pocket of Khaled identified the group as “the Martyrs of Palestine”.

The Vienna attack was carried out by Palestinians Tawfik Ben Ahmed Chaoval, Abdel Aziz Merzoughi, and Mongi Ben Abdollah Saadqoui who was killed; A “fourth man” from Turkey named Ali Ben Bechin Dhakli, the real head of the company, eluded authorities but had briefed the three Palestinians over breakfast in the Air Terminal Restaurant that morning and left before the attacks began.

Police officials said that two of the terrorists killed at the Rome airport had used Moroccan passports with the names Mohammed Bou Darwish and Yasser Bou Hmida. Police officials who declined to be named said that although Bou Darwish’s and Bou Hmida’s passports had not been recovered in the raid, the two men using them apparently had been registered at two cheap Rome hotels along the Via Cavour as for long as three weeks before the attack.

The surviving terrorist in the Rome airport attack, Mahmoud Ibrahim Khaled, was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment in 1988, released early on good behavior in June 2010, and was living in Rome in 2011.

In 1987, an Austrian court sentenced the two surviving terrorists in the Vienna airport attack to life imprisonment. Mongi Ben Saadaoui was released in 2008 after 22 years in prison and banned from entering Austria for ten years. The other terrorist, Tawfik Ben Ahmed Chaovali, received an additional sentence of 19 years for attempting to escape in 1995 and for participating in the 1996 hostage-taking in the Graz-Karlau prison.

Interestingly, Michael Moore happened to have been at the Vienna Airport on December 27, 1985, having survived by barely missing the attack.

But there’s so much more when we step into 1986, as the Pentagon propagandists aren’t giving up using the crisis in Rome and Vienna to serve as a pretext to strike Libya, regardless to what lack of evidence it has to implicate those terrorist attacks being carried out under the behest of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.

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2 thoughts on “1985 – Struggling Party of God: Terrorized West and US ramping up of Anti-Libya propaganda”

  1. Pingback: 1986 – The Struggle and The Volcano: Terrorized West & Provisional Turnarounds – Pretexts against Libya continued – 9/11 SKEPTICS Vs. TRUTH
  2. Pingback: Ahmed Shah Masood and Salmon Rushdie – Ideological Opposites as 9/11 Targets: What did and didn’t happen before and on Sept. 11th – 9/11 SKEPTICS Vs. TRUTH

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