‘Glamour’ pose... with an AK-47

BY the time Leila Khaled was 28, she had hijacked two planes – and achieved wordwide infamy.

On August 29, 1969 she became the world’s first female terrorist hijacker when she helped seize TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Athens.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) thought the Israeli ambassador to the US would be on board.

When they discovered he wasn’t, the Boeing 707 was diverted to Damascus where it was partly blown up after the hostages had disembarked.

Afterwards, Khaled posed for a now notorious set of photographs in a headscarf and brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle.

She then resorted to plastic surgery to disguise her face so she could continue taking part in hijack operations without being recognised.

Her next outrage came during the so-called Black September campaign of terror attacks in 1970. On September 6, Khaled and an accomplice managed to board El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York.

The raid was to become part of the Dawson’s Field hijackings, a series of almost simultaneous hijackings carried out by the PFLP. ‘I had a pistol in my belt, a grenade in my pocket and TNT in my bag, said Khaled in a later interview.

‘I was a woman dressed in a fashionable way. I opened my bag for security but the man just saw my make-up and waved me through.’ Khaled threatened to detonate her grenades unless the plane was diverted to Damascus and the pair attempted to storm the cockpit.

But her fellow hijacker was shot, she was apprehended and the plane safely made an emergency landing at Heathrow.

Khaled was arrested, but she was released a month later in exchange for hostages taken in another airliner attack.

The former hijacker, whose family fled to Lebanon during the Palestinian exodus from Israel when she was four, has said she has no regrets about taking part in hijacks and has continued to endorse violent tactics. In a 2016 interview, the 74-year-old, who is still a senior member of the PLFP, said: ‘When you defend humanity, you use all the means at your disposal. Some use words, some use arms and some use politics. Some use negotiations.

‘I chose arms and I believe that taking up arms is one of the main tools to solve this conflict in the interest of the oppressed and not the oppressors. This is a historical conflict. It cannot be solved by negotiations.’

‘Cannot be solved by negotiations’