On 6 February 1974, Palestinian militants occupied the Japanese embassy in Kuwait City, taking the ambassador and ten others hostage. The militants' motive was to support the Japanese Red Army members and Palestinian militants who were holding hostages on a Singaporean ferry in what is known as the Laju incident. Ultimately, the hostages were released, and the guerrillas were allowed to fly to Aden.
The purpose behind the attack was to provide support to the four guerrillas trapped on a ferry named Laju they hijacked in Singapore after a failed attempt at destroying a Royal Dutch Shell refinery. The men had been trapped on the ferry for 7 days until they surrendered their weapons and freed their hostages, as a result of the embassy attack they would be flown to Kuwait and then to Yemen.
While the identities or even number of the men involved is unknown they are said to have been members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular left-wing Marxist-Leninist revolutionary socialist group founded by George Habash in 1967. They were previously known for plane hijackings such as the TWA Flight 840 hijacking in 1969. They were known to be allies of the Japanese Red Army and many other far-left terrorist groups and are still active to this day.
Before noon on 6 February 1974, an unknown number of Palestinian militants who identified themselves as members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine occupied the Japanese embassy in Kuwait City. Taking the Japanese Ambassador to Kuwait and several members of his staff hostage. The militants' motive was to support Japanese Red Army members and other Palestinian militants who were holding hostages on a Singaporean ferry in what is known as the Laju incident. In conjunction with a third group known as the Sons of Occupied Arab Territories, these groups claimed responsibility [1] for the Laju incident and demanded that the Japanese government send a plane to Singapore. The plane was then supposed to pick up the men responsible for the Laju incident, who were also holding hostages in a hijacked ferry, to Kuwait. The Japanese government would respond the next day on Thursday, 7 February, by appealing to the Kuwait government so they could land a special Japan Airlines plane with the militants from Laju; however, the Kuwait government refused. This was the first time Palestinian guerrillas struck in Kuwait as their royal family, headed by Sheik Sabah Al-Salim Al-Sabah, funded the Palestinian resistance movement. Kuwait had been a regular endpoint for Palestinian plane hijacking in the past and had considered itself safe.
The next day, Thursday, February 7, the Japanese government would give in to the guerrillas' demands and provide a plane for the perpetrators of the Laju incident. The guerrillas released the hostages unharmed and were flown to Yemen with the Laju perpetrators.
The Japanese Red Army was a militant communist organization active from 1971 to 2001. It was designated a terrorist organization by Japan and the United States. The JRA was founded by Fusako Shigenobu and Tsuyoshi Okudaira in February 1971, and was most active in the 1970s and 1980s, operating mostly out of Lebanon with PFLP collaboration and funding from Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, as well as Syria and North Korea.
Leila Khaled is a Palestinian refugee, former militant, and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Black September, also known as the Jordanian Civil War, was an armed conflict between Jordan, led by King Hussein, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by chairman Yasser Arafat. The main phase of the fighting took place between 16 and 27 September 1970, though certain aspects of the conflict continued until 17 July 1971.
In December 1973, a terrorist group executed a series of attacks originating at Rome-Fiumicino Airport in Italy which resulted in the deaths of 34 people. The attacks began with an airport-terminal invasion and hostage-taking, followed by the firebombing of a Pan Am aircraft and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight.
Patricio José Argüello Ryan, commonly referred to simply as Patrick Argüello, was a Nicaraguan-American Marxist–Leninist militant. He was a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), and is best-known for his unsuccessful hijacking of El Al Flight 219 alongside Palestinian militant Leila Khaled on September 6, 1970. Flight 219 was an international civilian passenger flight from Tel Aviv to New York City that was hijacked by the duo shortly after it took off from a stopover in Amsterdam. Argüello and Khaled, acting on part of a larger series of hijackings by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), ultimately failed to take control of the plane due to heavy resistance from the passengers and security, who subdued the duo after pilot Uri Bar-Lev had thrown them off balance by putting the plane into a steep nosedive. Bar-Lev then made an emergency landing at Heathrow Airport in London, where Argüello was shot multiple times, later succumbing to his injuries. The FSLN had agreed to support the PFLP's hijackings in exchange for guerrilla warfare training.
The Coastal Road massacre occurred on 11 March 1978, when Palestinian militants hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murdered its occupants; 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed as a result of the attack while 76 more were wounded. The attack was planned by the influential Palestinian militant leader Khalil al-Wazir and carried out by Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist party co-founded by al-Wazir and Yasser Arafat in 1959. The initial plan of the militants was to seize a luxury hotel in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and take tourists and foreign ambassadors hostage in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
Wadie Haddad, also known as Abu Hani, was a Palestinian militant who led the combat operations of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was responsible for organizing several hijackings of international civilian passenger aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s, the most infamous of which was the Entebbe hijacking, when Palestinian/German militants under his command held 106 hostages — both Israelis and non-Israeli Jews — on a flight from Israel to France after diverting it to Uganda.
An attack on the Saudi embassy in Khartoum took place on 1 March 1973. It was carried out by the Black September Organization. Ten diplomats were taken hostage. After President Richard Nixon stated that he refused to negotiate with terrorists, and insisted that "no concessions" would be made, the three Western hostages were killed.
The Laju incident, also known as the Laju ferry hijacking, occurred on 31 January 1974 in Singapore. Four armed men from the terrorist groups Japanese Red Army and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attacked the Shell oil refinery complex on Pulau Bukom and later hijacked the ferryboat Laju and took its five crew members hostage. The crisis was resolved after the Singapore government provided the terrorists safe passage to the Middle East in exchange for the release of the hostages.
1983–1988 Kuwait terror attacks refers to various pro-Iran terror attacks during the Iran–Iraq War. 25 people were killed and more than 175 people were wounded. Following the attacks, Kuwait's economy significantly suffered.
The El Al Flight 253 attack was a terrorist attack perpetrated by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) against a Boeing 707 passenger plane while it was on the ground at a stopover in Athens en route from Tel Aviv, Israel, to New York City, United States.
Events in the year 1972 in Israel.
Events in the year 1970 in Israel.
Kuwait Airways Flight 422 was a Boeing 747 jumbo jet hijacked en route from Bangkok, Thailand, to Kuwait City, Kuwait on 5 April 1988, leading to a hostage crisis that lasted 16 days and encompassed three continents. The hijacking was carried out by several Lebanese guerillas who demanded the release of 17 Shi'ite Muslim prisoners being held by Kuwait for their role in the 1983 Kuwait bombings. During the incident the flight, initially forced to land in Iran, traveled 3,200 mi (5,100 km) from Mashhad in northeastern Iran to Larnaca, Cyprus, and finally to Algiers.
The Israeli Bangkok embassy hostage crisis occurred on 28 December 1972. It was a raid by a squad of four Palestinian militants, belonging to the Black September organization, on the Israeli embassy building in Bangkok in which the militants held six Israeli embassy staff hostage. After 19 hours of negotiations, the hijackers agreed to abandon the embassy in exchange for being flown to Egypt. The raid was one of a number of attacks that have been conducted against Israeli embassies and diplomats.
The Achille Lauro hijacking took place on 7 October 1985, when the Italian ocean liner MS Achille Lauro was hijacked by four men representing the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) off the coast of Egypt, as she was sailing from Alexandria to Ashdod, Israel. A 69-year-old Jewish American man in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, was murdered by the hijackers and thrown overboard. The hijacking sparked the "Sigonella Crisis".
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a secular Palestinian Marxist–Leninist and revolutionary socialist organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization, the largest being Fatah.
The hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 649 was an aircraft hijacking that took place between 22 and 23 February 1972. Eventually, all hostages on board the seized Boeing 747-230B were released when the West German government paid a ransom of US$5 million.
The 1973 Hellinikon International Airport attack was an attack at the Hellinikon International Airport at Athens, Greece. The two attackers were members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September. The militants used sub-machine guns and grenades against the passengers waiting in the passenger lounge. The attackers took hostages before they finally surrendered to the Greek police. It is believed that the gunmen wanted to hijack a plane, but they decided to attack when they were about to be searched by a Greek security inspector before boarding.