Rome and Vienna airport attacks | |
---|---|
Location | Fiumicino, Italy Schwechat, Austria |
Date | 27 December 1985 9:15 am (UTC+1) |
Target | Israeli targets in Leonardo da Vinci Airport (Rome) and Vienna International Airport (Vienna) |
Attack type | Shootings, bombings |
Weapons | Assault rifles Grenades |
Deaths | 19 (+4 terrorists) |
Injured | 138 (+1 terrorist) |
Perpetrators | Abu Nidal Organization (purported) |
The Rome and Vienna airport attacks were two major terrorist attacks carried out on 27 December 1985. Seven Arab terrorists attacked two airports in Rome, Italy, and Vienna, Austria, with assault rifles and hand grenades. Nineteen civilians were killed and over a hundred were injured before four of the terrorists were killed by El Al Security personnel and local police, who captured the remaining three.
At 08:15 GMT, four Arab gunmen walked to the shared ticket counter for Israel's El Al Airlines and Trans World Airlines at Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport outside Rome, Italy, fired assault rifles and threw grenades. [1] [2] They killed 16 and wounded 99, including American diplomat Wes Wessels, before three of the attackers were killed by El Al security, while the remaining one, Mohammed Sharam, was wounded and captured by the Italian police. The dead included General Donato Miranda Acosta, Mexican military attache, and his secretary, Genoveva Jaime Cisneros.
Minutes later, at Schwechat Airport (Vienna International Airport) in Vienna, Austria, three terrorists carried out a similar attack. Hand grenades were thrown into crowds of passengers queuing to check in for a flight to Tel Aviv, killing two people instantly and wounding 39 others. A third victim died on 22 January 1986, of hand grenade wounds sustained in the attack. First response came from several Austrian police officers, who opened fire on the terrorists. They were supported by two plainclothes El Al security guards who helped to repel the attackers. Over 200 bullets were fired during the fight. The terrorists seized a Mercedes outside the terminal and fled, with Austrian police and El Al security guards giving chase. They killed one terrorist and captured the other two several miles from the airport after a short car chase and gun battle. [3]
In all, the two strikes killed 19, including a child, and wounded around 140. Some contemporary reports claimed the gunmen originally intended to hijack El Al jets at the airports and blow them up over Tel Aviv; [4] others concluded that the attack on waiting passengers was the original plan and that the Frankfurt airport was meant to be hit as well. [5] : 244
The attacks came after increased security due to recent hijackings and official Interpol warnings that airports might be targeted by terrorists during the holiday season.
Italian authorities stated that receipts uncovered on the terrorists indicated that they had entered Italy a few weeks earlier and had stayed in hotels near Rome. They all had Moroccan passports. It was also reported that a note in Arabic was found on the body of one of the attackers, addressed to ''Zionists'' and announcing, ''the war has begun.'' The note was reportedly signed, ''the martyrs of Palestine.'' [6]
Israeli authorities first blamed the attacks on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but its leader, Yasser Arafat, denied the accusations and denounced the strikes. The PLO expressed 'indignation at the criminal act'' and asserted that the attacks were coordinated as part of a ''plot against the Palestinian cause'', intending to force Austria and Italy into severing ties with the Palestinians. [5] : 246 PLO officials recalled that Arafat had recently pledged that coordinated armed Palestinian resistance would be confined to Israel and the occupied territories.
Responsibility for the two attacks was later claimed by the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) in retaliation for Operation Wooden Leg, the Israeli bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunis on 1 October 1985. [7] Libya was accused by the US of funding the terrorists who carried out the attacks; although they denied the charges, they did praise the assaults. [1] According to published reports, sources close to Abu Nidal said 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." [5] : 245 Italian secret services blamed Syria and Iran. [8]
The surviving terrorist in the Rome airport attack, Syrian national Mahmoud Ibrahim Khaled (Khalid Ibrahim), was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment in 1988. He was released early on good behavior in June 2010 and was living in Rome in 2011. He was employed, and had a girlfriend. [9] In an interview with Il Messaggero , he condemned terrorism, expressed remorse for the attacks, and said that he prays for God's forgiveness. [10] In 1987, an Austrian court sentenced the two surviving terrorists in the Vienna airport attack to life imprisonment. [11]
The Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) is the most common name for the Palestinian nationalist militant group Fatah – The Revolutionary Council. The ANO is named after its founder Abu Nidal. It was created by a split from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO in 1974. The group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, Canada, and the European Union.
The Black September Organization (BSO) was a Palestinian militant organization founded in 1970. Besides other actions, the group was responsible for the assassination of the Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tal, and the Munich massacre, in which eleven Israeli athletes and officials were kidnapped and killed, as well as a West German policeman losing his life, during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, their most publicized event. These attacks led to the creation or specialization of permanent counter-terrorism forces in many European countries.
Sabri Khalil al-Banna, known by his nom de guerreAbu Nidal, was the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council, a militant Palestinian splinter group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). At the height of its militancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the ANO was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian groups.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command or PFLP-GC is a Palestinian nationalist militant organisation based in Syria.
Vienna International Airport is the international airport of Vienna, the capital of Austria, located in Schwechat, 18 km (11 mi) southeast of central Vienna and 57 kilometres (35 mi) west of Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. It is the country's largest airport and serves as the hub for Austrian Airlines as well as a base for low-cost carriers Ryanair and Wizz Air. It is capable of handling wide-body aircraft up to the Airbus A380. The airport features a dense network of European destinations as well as long-haul flights to Asia, North America and Africa.
The 1982 Lebanon War, dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee by the Israeli government, later known in Israel as the Lebanon War or the First Lebanon War, and known in Lebanon as "the invasion", began on 6 June 1982, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invaded southern Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the IDF that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. The military operation was launched after gunmen from Abu Nidal's organization attempted to assassinate Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin blamed Abu Nidal's enemy, the PLO, for the incident, and used the incident as a casus belli for the invasion.
Operation Bayonet was a covert operation directed by Mossad to assassinate individuals they accused of being involved in the 1972 Munich massacre. The targets were members of the Palestinian armed militant group Black September and operatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Authorized by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the autumn of 1972, the operation is believed to have continued for over twenty years. While Mossad killed several prominent Palestinians during the operation, they never managed to kill the mastemind behind Munich, namely Abu Daoud.
Mohammed Abu Talb is an Egyptian-born militant who was convicted on 21 December 1989 of a series of bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam in 1985, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in Sweden. He has also been investigated in connection with the 21 December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
The 1981 Vienna synagogue attack was a terror attack that occurred 29 August 1981. The incident took place in the Stadttempel of Vienna, Austria carried out by two terrorists of the Abu Nidal Organization.
Events in the year 1985 in Israel.
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 Great Synagogue of Rome attack, which was carried out by armed Palestinian terrorists at the entrance to the Great Synagogue of Rome, took place on 9 October 1982 at 11:55 a.m. A 2-year-old toddler, Stefano Gaj Taché, was killed in the attack, while 37 civilians were injured.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 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.
On 27 July 1980, Said Al Nasr, a Syria-born Palestinian, used grenades to attack a group of 40 Jewish children waiting with their families for a bus to take them to summer camp. One boy was killed and 20 other people were wounded in the attack. The attacker was convicted.
On 19 June 1985, a bombing at the Frankfurt Airport, West Germany, killed three and wounded 74 people. A second bomb was found and defused not far from the first explosion. Two of those killed were Australian children, 2-year-old and 5-year-old siblings, and the third a Portuguese man.
On 1 July 1985, in an attack that had targeted the American Trans World Airlines offices in Madrid, Spain, the British Airways offices in the floor below were bombed, killing a woman and wounding 27 people, most of them Spanish. The bombing was followed up minutes later when gunmen opened fire with submachine guns on the Alia Royal Jordanian Airline offices some hundred yards away, injuring two people by shattered glass. Up to three grenades were thrown at the office, but failed to explode or were defused.
The 1978 Orly Airport attack was a shoot-out that took place on 20 May 1978 in the Paris Orly Airport, France as three terrorists armed with submachine guns opened fire at the El Al boarding gate. The terrorists were also reportedly carrying grenades and plastic explosives in the shoot-out that lasted for 25 minutes. Two people including one police officer were killed before the three terrorists were shot and killed by French police and Israeli security guards. Five people waiting to board a nearby Iberia flight to Malaga were wounded. The airport was evacuated for about three hours after the attack. According to Israeli sources the group behind the attack was a unit headed by Abu Nidal which cooperated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
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.
The Neve Shalom Synagogue massacre happened on 6 September 1986 when a group of suspected Abu Nidal Organization terrorists killed 22 worshipers inside the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey.