Terrorism Carnage Once Again %

By William E. Smith

"There was a power failure . . . They opened fire blindly and threw hand grenades. It was like a holocaust."

Indian Salesman Hussain Sahfi, his business suit stained with blood, still seemed in shock last week as he uttered those words. Just before dawn last Friday, Pan American World Airways Flight 73 had touched down at Pakistan's Karachi International Airport on a scheduled, 21-hour flight from Bombay to Frankfurt and New York. Eighteen hours later, a few minutes before 10 p.m. Friday, the 747 jumbo jet still stood on the tarmac, but by then at least 17 of the plane's estimated 400 passengers and crew members were dead, victims of a hijacking and a subsequent firefight. About 125 more were injured, some critically. Of the four Palestinian terrorists who had commandeered the plane, all were in custody, including one who was gravely injured.

After a four-month respite that, coincidentally or not, followed the U.S. air attack on Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, Middle Eastern terrorists were on the rampage once again. Only hours after the bloody denouement in Karachi, masked Arab gunmen stalked into an Istanbul synagogue during the morning Sabbath service and, firing machine guns, murdered more than a score of Jewish worshipers.

In Karachi, so frenzied were the final moments of the hijacking ordeal that survivors disagreed over whether the firing and the explosion of hand grenades had lasted as briefly as 30 seconds or as long as five minutes. Many of the luckiest passengers, who skidded unhurt down the escape chutes, were so terrified that they ran for several hundred yards without stopping until they reached the nearest of the airport's three terminals.

Dozens of others, suffering from shock and injury, milled around the tarmac. Some of the more seriously wounded lay on the pavement. As ambulances arrived, security personnel frantically waved them to a halt, then loaded them with the injured and dying. When rescue workers ran out of ambulances, they pressed pickup trucks into service, and these joined the long line of vehicles heading toward local hospitals.

Exactly what happened during the last terrible moments of the ordeal is not clear, but survivors agree that the climax came after the plane's internal generator, which powered the lights and air conditioning aboard the 747, failed, probably because the lubricating oil had run low. At that point, Pakistani authorities sent their trained commandos into action.

None of the passengers were certain that the hijackers saw commandos near the aircraft. But once the lights were off, the hijackers gave every sign of preparing for battle. One was heard telling a comrade, "The moment for the last jihad (holy war) has arrived. If we are killed, we will all be martyrs."

The terrorists, alternately harsh and conciliatory, angrily ordered passengers to move to the center of the plane. Some obeyed, while others tried to hide in the darkness. Recalls Michael Goldstein, a physician from Los Angeles: "The stewardesses were using megaphones, asking passengers to be very quiet amd not to panic." Then, with scores of people crouching in the middle of the plane, the terrorists shouted out an ominous countdown: "One . . . two . . . three!" On the count of three they began firing machine guns from the forward part of the craft and exploding hand grenades at the rear. Some of the passengers broke open the emergency doors, which automatically inflated escape chutes. During this moment of horror, says Goldstein, "I literally threw my wife out the door, and a few other people, before I jumped myself."

Others, cut off from the emergency exits, were caught in the random gunfire. Arun Athavale, of El Toro, Calif., saw a family of four sprayed by bullets but could not tell whether any survived. Athavale, who escaped injury by falling to the floor, said later, "Most of the people who got killed didn't duck." Outside the aircraft, people were walking around in a daze, too shocked to realize they were among the ones who had been spared.

The hijacking of Flight 73 was by no means the most protracted or lethal of the terrorist attacks that have plagued the world's airlines for more than 15 years. Over the long term, it will probably be less vividly remembered than last year's hijacking of TWA Flight 847 to Beirut, which lasted 17 days, even though that episode resulted in the death of only one passenger, vs. at least 17 on the Pan Am jet at Karachi. But the latest hijacking was particularly dispiriting, coming as it did after months of relative calm. Gradually, many government and airline officials had convinced themselves that the stepped-up security measures taken at airports throughout much of the world, as well as President Reagan's raid on Libyan targets in April, had seriously and perhaps decisively affected international terrorism. Last week's events proved emphatically that this was not the case.

| As usual, even the identity and motivation of the terrorists involved were uncertain, though there was little doubt that they were Palestinian. One of the gunmen shouted to journalists as he was led away by police, "I am a Palestinian commando!" But in the crazy-quilt language of contemporary terrorism, that still left a lot unexplained. Early in the course of the hijacking, an anonymous Arab called a Western news agency office in Nicosia, Cyprus, and claimed responsibility for the Libyan Revolutionary Cells, a previously unknown group. Denials came almost instantaneously from Radio Tripoli and from Gaddafi, who was attending the nonaligned conference in Zimbabwe. Next, an obscure Shi'ite organization calling itself Jundullah, or Soldiers of God, announced it was responsible. Most Western intelligence agencies were skeptical.

Probably the best clue came from the Pan Am hijackers themselves, who demanded that they be flown to Cyprus to negotiate the release from prison of three of their friends and comrades. They were referring, apparently, to two Arabs and a young Briton who were sentenced to life imprisonment last year for the murder of three Israelis aboard a yacht in the port of Larnaca. The convicted trio claimed the Israelis were intelligence agents posing as tourists, a charge that Israel denied. The three were believed to be members of Force 17, the personal bodyguard of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Briton, Ian Michael Davison, 29, was known to have fought in Arafat's P.L.O. force in Lebanon in 1982. So the most likely theory was that last week's hijackers, though they carried passports from Bahrain, were members of Arafat's Fatah organization. Others, however, believed that Renegade Palestinian Abu Nidal, implicated in several of last year's terrorist outrages, might have been responsible.

For the Greek Cypriot government of President Spyros Kyprianou, the Karachi hijacking presented a dilemma. Cyprus is anxious not to antagonize its Arab neighbors, but is determined to do everything it can to discourage hijackers from landing at Larnaca airport. As soon as the terrorists demanded they be flown to the eastern Mediterranean island, the Cypriot government announced that the jumbo jet would not be allowed to land there. Whether the Cypriots would have remained firm in their resolve if the Pan Am plane had arrived in their air space is uncertain. "But fortunately," sighed one relieved Cypriot official, "our will was not put to the test."

In Santa Barbara, the Reagan Administration condemned the hijacking and ordered a Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier, the Forrestal, to proceed from Naples to the vicinity of Cyprus in the event that the Pan Am jet was flown there. Vice Admiral John Poindexter, the National Security Adviser, telephoned news of the hijacking to President Reagan at his ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains just as the Reagans were about to set out on their daily horseback ride. Later the White House released a statement declaring, "Nothing can justify such barbarism. We can think of no punishment too severe for the criminals responsible." In an address at Harvard University, Secretary of State George Shultz lamented that "the day has not yet arrived when terrorism has taken its place among other vanquished barbarisms of our time." The U.S. dispatched a secret Delta team to Karachi to be used if a commando assault on the aircraft was required. But the bloody affair ended several hours before the Delta team reached Pakistan.

In Karachi, the drama began early Friday morning as passengers were boarding the plane for the flight to Frankfurt and New York. Most of the passengers were Indians or Pakistanis; the 80 or so Americans on the plane were mainly of South Asian ancestry. Among the travelers was a disgruntled businessman, Jay Grandtier of Parker, Colo., who had left Bombay that morning under the impression that Flight 73 was a nonstop to Frankfurt. "I got even more disappointed as the day went on," he quipped later.

Suddenly a small van drove up to the plane, and out jumped four men dressed in the blue uniforms of local airport workers. They clambered up the boarding stairs, firing wildly with their automatic rifles. Once inside they shouted, "Hands up! Hands up!" An instant later, the captain and two other members of the cockpit crew escaped from the plane through a hatch, using a special emergency cable. Questions were later raised as to whether the captain should have stayed with his craft, but Pan Am officials in New York City stoutly defended his action, insisting this had effectively immobilized the plane and reduced the hijackers' options.

Fierce and nervous at first, the terrorists demanded to be flown to Cyprus, asked for an Arabic-speaking crew to take them there and set the first of several deadlines. The group's leader, who said his name was Mustafa, warned the control tower, "No American should approach the aircraft. Otherwise we will give them a tough fight. We will not commit suicide." When the terrorists collected passengers' passports, a flight attendant concealed some of the American ones because she suspected that U.S. citizens were at special risk.

Soon after that, for no apparent reason, the hijackers called a passenger, Rajesh Kumar, 29, to the front of the plane, shot him in the head and dumped him out of the plane. He died later in a Karachi hospital. His family in Huntington Beach, Calif., said Kumar, who was born in Kenya of Indian parents, became an American citizen less than two months ago.

In the beginning, the hijackers threatened to kill a hostage every ten minutes unless their demands were met. They ordered passengers to crouch in their seats, with their heads in their hands. Eventually, however, the terrorists relaxed and allowed the crew to serve sandwiches and cold drinks. The gunmen talked about the P.L.O. and their desire to gain the release of their friends in Cyprus. One hijacker told a woman passenger, "You will like it there. You can sit in the sun and swim." The day passed slowly, the passengers anxious and aching with fatigue.

Shortly before 10 that evening, when the lights went out, everything changed. Pakistani authorities at first hinted that they had been anticipating the failure of the power unit and hoped to exploit it by staging a commando raid. Later they changed their story, maintaining that the lights failed much earlier than expected and that the panicky hijackers began shooting wildly, causing the Pakistanis to send the commandos into action in an effort to save lives.

In any event, the chaos aboard Flight 73 was all too real. "They herded us together and ordered us to lie down on the floor," recalled Dick Melhart, of Pullman, Wash., who had been thinking all day about how he should try to escape if the opportunity came. Said David Jodice, of Vienna, Va.: "They were shouting at us in pitch darkness, and then we totally panicked when they threw a hand grenade at the passengers." At that point, said British Passenger Michael Thexton, "everyone made a dash for it. I climbed out onto a wing and jumped down onto the tarmac and ran." Catherine Dumas, of Lafayette, N.J., who escaped the plane without a scratch but suffered a sprained ankle when a nervous ambulance driver ran over her foot, called the scramble "one of those Three Stooges comedy situations." By that time the Pakistani commandos | were moving in on the plane. Moments later, when one of the terrorists attempted to escape by melting into the fleeing crowd, he was identified by angry passengers and arrested on the spot.

Piecing together a clear picture of precisely what happened during the closing minutes of the incident was complicated by the inconsistency of Pakistani authorities in explaining what they had done. At first they implied that once the aircraft lights had failed, they had ordered their commandos to storm the plane. The Reagan Administration immediately announced that the Pakistanis had handled the situation "boldly and decisively" -- a statement intended mainly to demonstrate Washington's satisfaction with Pakistan's cooperation.

The trouble was that this version of events seemed to violate the generally accepted rules of dealing with hijackers by prolonging negotiations as long as possible to wear the terrorists down. In the words of Vice Chairman Martin R. Shugrue Jr. of Pan Am, which has been promoting its new, improved security system, every expert on the subject counseled, "Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. Buy time, buy time, buy time." Indeed, a U.S. diplomat in Karachi who had been involved in bargaining with the hijackers said later, "The game plan was to keep them talking as long as possible."

The Pakistanis' revised version also seemed less than satisfactory. Many experts doubted that the failed generator had precipitated the fire fight and suspected that the Pakistanis were trying to cover up a bungled commando operation. But in the end, the Pakistanis may simply have decided that it was better to risk the lives of some passengers on the ground than to allow the aircraft to take off.

As for the hijackers, it was hard to see how their action had remotely advanced any Palestinian political aims, which include the recovery of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They had failed to spring their allies from prison in Larnaca or even to reach Cyprus themselves, and their murderous misadventure in Karachi had turned into a bloodbath that antagonized Pakistan, a Muslim country that has always been sympathetic to the Palestinians' demands.

With reporting by Safdar Barlas and Ross H. Munro/Karachi, with other bureaus