On this day 31 years ago, Lufthansa Flight 181 travelling from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt was hijacked by four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This was just over a year after the PFLP hijacking which ended with a midnight Israeli raid at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Flight 181 was diverted to Rome, then to Larnaca, Bahrain, Dubai and Aden, before landing in Mogadishu, Somalia, very early in the morning on 17 October 1977.
A demand was made for the release of a number of Red Army Faction terrorists, and a very tight deadline was set. A GSG9 elite German counter-terrorism commando team had been following the hijacked plane, and shortly before the deadline expired they gained access to the plane through escape hatches under the fuselage, set off specially designed stun grenades, entered the plane, identified and shot the hijackers, and rescued the hostages.
The pilot had been killed by the hijackers, and three of the hijackers were killed. One of the passengers was injured, and one of the hijackers survived despite several bullet wounds. The surviving hijacker, Souhaila Andrawes, was sentenced to prison in Somalia but released after one year. Many years later she was tracked down in Norway and extradited to Germany where she received a further 12-year sentence for the same crime.