How UAE handled 1977 hijack
BOOK CHRONICLES HOW MOHAMMAD BIN RASHID COORDINATED MILITARY RESPONSE TO 1977 HIJACKING OF PLANE
Compilation chronicles safety and security challenges country faced in 1970s
BY SAMI ZAATARI Staff Reporter
Explaining the process, Yates said he gathered a team of volunteers to go through the national archives to find all the relevant material that was needed. “We extracted the [information] from these newspapers — The Abu Dhabi News,
UAE News, [and] Emirates News. They were all government newspapers that initially started out as one large piece of paper folded in two. [The fourth newspaper was] the Gulf Weekly Mirror, a private newspaper that first started out in Bahrain and then in the 1970s it moved down to Dubai.
“I put out a call for volunteers who were willing to go through this giant pile of newspapers from the 1970s, so we had teams of people, and we told them the stories we wanted, and they went out and found them from the National Archive,” he added.
One of the fascinating insights given by the book was about several plane hijackings that took place during that era.
“Up to 1977, there were five hijackings by various groups — the Red Brigades, which was a leftist group from Germany that was trying to push for the professor at Khalifa University has compiled a series of English newspaper clippings from the 1970s into a book that gives a glimpse of some of the safety and security challenges the UAE faced during that decade.
The book titled
Catastrophes, Crashes & Accidents in the UAE: Newspaper articles of the 1970s,
provides an insight into several events that happened during the decade, including crimes, hijackings and natural disasters which all together shaped and improved the country’s approach to safety and security.
“[The book] covers examples of civil security incidents during the 1970s … People correctly assess that the security of this place (UAE) is very safe and low risk, however, that [success] has been built on by the excellent work of the Ministry of Interior (MoI) and a whole lot of other agencies,” said Athol Yates, editor of the publication, during a lecture about the book at New York University Abu Dhabi on Wednesday.
“This book highlights that there has been a very large number of threats and hazards that the UAE has faced. [The publication] covers these hazards, [such as] earthquakes, technological disasters, accidents, man-made hazards, and biological hazards,” he added.
Yates added that the book received approval from the National Media Council (NMC), and also received support from the ministry. Commandos maintain a vigil on a hijacked Lufthansa jetliner in Dubai on October 15, 1977. Flight 181 was hijacked during a trip from Spain and later diverted to several destinations, including Dubai. A German counter-terrorism group arrived in Dubai to storm the hijacked plane, but those plans were delayed after the plane left Dubai and eventually landed in Mogadishu. Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid, who was then defence minister, strategising the response to the hijacking in 1977. ■ Athol Yates talking about the book he edited during a lecture at the New York University Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. ■ end of imperialism. There was also a Japanese Red Brigade that carried out a hijacking and they were linked to some other groups in Lebanon. So there was a whole range of nationalities and causes that resulted in the hijackings,” he said.
“One of the more famous incidents was when His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, played an instrumental role in forming the military response [against the hijacking], at the time he served as the defence minister,” explained Yates, talking about the Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking on October 13, 1977.
The plane was hijacked during a flight from Spain by four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and later diverted to several
destinations, including Dubai. “What was fascinating was the amount of direct involvement in the incident [from the newspapers], in terms of the reporting there was a lot of detail about the operational response …
“In an interview, Shaikh Mohammad said that it was his plan to keep the hijackers nervous in the event that they would give up, and in more quotes [he said] they kept up a constant movement of cars and helicopters to make [the hijackers] nervous, and also delayed the plane’s refuelling for 18 hours,” he added.
Yates went on to describe how a German counter-terrorism
group arrived in Dubai to storm the hijacked plane, but those plans were dropped after the plane left Dubai and eventually landed in Mogadishu, Somalia, for the operation to be successfully carried out there.
As the UAE was still a new country during the 1970s, the newspapers were a great source for documenting the nation’s early security developments.
“There was a series of interesting crashes and when you start to look at the same similar type of incident at the same location, what you do see occurring afterwards is the UAE leadership making a major change to address the problem,” Yates said.
A■