Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda. Peter Taylor
she cried, ‘I can’t bear the thought of you dying.’ Yahia remained unmoved. ‘No, I’m sorry. You are my mother and I love you, but I love God more than you, and we will see each other again in Paradise.’ The stalemate continued.
Despite the two brutal murders, there was still deadlock as the Algerian authorities refused to remove the passenger steps and give clearance for the plane to depart. The silence of that first long night was broken only by the sound of one of the hijackers walking up and down the aisles, reciting verses from his Koran and talking to the male passengers. ‘We are the mujahideen,’ he kept saying. ‘We have come here to die. Do you realise how lucky we are? We are going to die as mujahideen for our faith, for Allah. And can you believe it, there are seventy-two virgins waiting for us.’ None of the terrified passengers saw fit to question the certainty of his belief.
One of the cabin crew, Christophe Morin, had vivid recollections of that claustrophobic night in captivity. ‘It was hellish. The night seemed endless. The passengers were silent. It was like being trapped by a lead weight, drowning in those prayers. It was a world with no freedom, forced to listen to these endless verses.’ Zahida Kakachi remembers how still and beautiful the night outside looked. ‘There was a full moon. The ground seemed to be made of silver. There were all these white birds, and the tarmac was shimmering from the light of the moon.’ One of the hijackers noticed her looking transfixed out of the window. ‘Each of those birds will take a soul up to Paradise,’ he said. Zahida was not reassured.
On Christmas Day, the second day of the hijack, with the plane still grounded in Algiers, the French government had finally got its counter-terrorist plan in place after long deliberations involving the Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua. Members of France’s elite anti-terrorist police unit, the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN), had been flown to a disused military airport in Majorca to be on standby ready to storm the plane when the opportunity arose. Majorca was the closest the GIGN could get to Algeria without infringing Algerian sovereignty. The French had offered the Algerians assistance, but this had been politely refused. It would have been embarrassing and impolitic for the FLN government, that had fought the French in a bloody eight-year guerrilla war for independence, to be seen to be seeking assistance from its former colonial master. Pasqua told me that at this stage intelligence had been received from the Algerian secret service about the real purpose of the operation. ‘It was very worrying,’ he said. ‘The true aim of those terrorists was to crash the plane on Paris.’ Subsequently Metropolitan Police officers would raid a safe house in London believed to be connected with the hijackers and retrieve a propaganda pamphlet the front cover of which showed the Eiffel Tower in flames.
Christophe was convinced that he was going to die, and summoned up the courage to confront one of the hijackers and tell him that he did not want to meet his end with a shot to the back of the head: ‘Whoever my murderer turns out to be, I want him to look me straight in the eye as he kills me.’ The hijacker appears to have been surprised by the request. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Even if you do die, you will go straight to heaven where you will find seventy-two virgins waiting for you. You will die as a martyr, so there is nothing to be afraid of. So why are you scared?’ Christophe simply replied, ‘All I know is that we seem to be on a journey that will end in death.’
By the end of Christmas Day, with the plane still on the ground, the hijackers were getting desperate. Two bodies on the tarmac, visible proof of their determination to carry out their threats, had not been enough to persuade the Algerian authorities to let the plane depart. At 9 p.m. Yahia issued an ultimatum. Unless the plane was allowed to depart by 9.30 he would start executing the hostages one by one, at half-hour intervals, until they were allowed to take off for Paris. The deadline came and went. Yahia picked out a French hostage, Yannick Beugnet, a cook from the French Embassy in Algiers who was flying home to spend Christmas with his wife and children. At gunpoint, Yahia marched him to the cockpit and forced him to address the control tower, where his words were recorded: ‘Our lives are in danger now. If you don’t do something, they are going to execute us. Something must be done as soon as possible.’ Yahia then snatched the microphone and shouted, ‘I swear we will take him and we will dump him out of that door. And we don’t give a damn about you. See how we can hit you where we want and how we want. OK, so now we are going to throw him out. The door is already open. Now just listen to how we shoot him and dump him.’ A single shot is then heard on the recording.
With three bodies now lying beneath the plane, and the prospect of another one every thirty minutes, the Algerian authorities finally decided to give in. Although they had had their own special forces (colloquially known as the ‘Ninjas’ because they dressed all in black) on standby, they had decided against using them, fearing a bloodbath. That fear was shared by many of the passengers, who had little faith in the Ninjas’ ability to carry out a rescue without massive loss of life.
At 1 a.m. on Boxing Day, the third day of the hijacking, Yahia’s demands were finally met. The passenger steps which had prevented the plane from moving were finally taken away, and Flight 8969 was cleared for take-off. No doubt to the intense relief of the Algerian government, the problem was out of their hands. Now the French could deal with it.
The plane’s destination wasn’t Paris, but Marseilles. Captain Borderie explained why: ‘You need approximately twenty tons of fuel to get to Paris, but once you’ve been stuck on the ground for a couple of days, your reserves go down. You need fuel for the air conditioning, for electricity and for the coffee machines. With two hundred people on board, it goes quickly.’ French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua was now a much happier man. Knowing what he did about the real purpose of the hijacking, he didn’t want the aircraft to go anywhere near Paris. ‘Once it landed in Marseilles to refuel, it was absolutely clear in our minds that the plane wouldn’t be going anywhere else,’ he told me. Orders were given to the GIGN on standby in Majorca to get to Marseilles as quickly as possible, and to prepare to put their intensive training into practice and storm the plane. They arrived in Marseilles just twenty minutes before the Airbus touched down at 3 o’clock on Boxing Day morning.
Yahia, determined to get to Paris to carry out the planned attack, demanded twenty-seven tons of fuel, three times the amount necessary. The airport authorities played for time while the GIGN got ready. ‘We told the terrorists we would bring them some fuel,’ said Pasqua, ‘but we explained that we had some technical problems, and didn’t have enough tankers to transport it. We told them various things to gain time.’ The negotiations carried on through the morning and much of the afternoon, with Yahia growing increasingly frustrated and menacing at the lack of progress. ‘It’s not you who decide or the pilot,’ he warned the control tower. ‘We are the ones who decide. And you will pay very dearly.’
The protracted delay was necessary while the GIGN worked out where the hostages and the hijackers were located on the plane, and what weapons and explosives the hijackers had. Valuable information was fortuitously provided by an elderly couple whom Yahia agreed to let off the plane. He had been prepared to allow them to disembark in Algiers, but they hadn’t wanted to walk over the dead bodies. They came down the steps of the plane at 4.05 p.m., and were immediately debriefed by the GIGN. They were able to give details about the number of terrorists, their weapons and the hierarchy within the group. Yahia and his number two, they said, seemed to spend most of the time in the cockpit.
The French authorities managed to protract the negotiations for a total of thirteen hours. By then Yahia had had enough. ‘This is the last chance,’ he told the control tower. ‘One hour, and then you will have to bear the full responsibility.’ If the fuel didn’t arrive by a 5 p.m. deadline, he said, they would start killing the hostages. The three dead bodies in Algiers indicated that he meant what he said. As there was no sign of movement from the airport authorities, he probably knew that the hijackers were never going to get to Paris to carry out their mission. Zahida noticed their attitudes change as they realised that martyrdom in Marseilles was the only option left to them: ‘They started to read verses from the Koran out loud, and the verses spoke of death. “We shall die. God is waiting for you. We shall die as warriors. We do not fear death.”’
With five minutes to go to the 5 p.m. deadline, Zahida was convinced that she was going to die. Most of her fellow passengers