Word: claussen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fedayeen with camping space and money. Nonetheless, Lufthansa Flight 615 was empty when it left Damascus at 5:35 a.m. last week scheduled to Beirut, Ankara, Munich and Frankfurt. At Beirut, 13 passengers came aboard after a routine handbag and luggage check. Ten miles north of Cyprus, Captain Walter Claussen, 37, felt a gun muzzle at his neck and a soft-spoken Arab behind him on the flight deck. "I am the captain now," said the man, who called himself Abu Ali, a common Arab name. While he kept Claussen under surveillance, a companion dotted the plane with explosive charges...
...ordered Claussen to refuel in Cyprus and again at Zagreb; over the plane's intercom he announced the purpose of "Operation Munich": to free the imprisoned Black September trio and fly them to a friendly Arab country. By the time the 727 reached Zagreb, the West Germans were on full alert, and government officials had agreed to release the prisoners in exchange for the passengers and the plane. After taking on fuel, the plane left Zagreb and headed for Germany. Munich's Riem Airport was surrounded by policemen, border troops, armored cars and thousands of Bavarian Sunday drivers...
...skyjackers, who were determined not to release the Lufthansa plane or its passengers until the released prisoners were safely in Libya, refused to accept any arrangement. Instead, they ordered Claussen to keep flying over Yugoslavia until the prisoners landed in Zagreb. Fuel ran so low that the captain had to cut off two of his three engines; if the third one shut down, the terrorists warned, they would simply blow up the plane...
...Claussen meanwhile was urgently arguing against the German reluctance to accept the Arab terms. "The situation is getting more and more serious," he radioed at one point. "They really mean it. Get on with it, man." Later he implored: "Will you believe me that they've got it set in their heads that their three comrades come on board my plane without anybody being released?" Aloft over West Germany, Lufthansa's Culmann finally decided that the situation represented a "supra-legal emergency." Without consulting Bonn, he ordered the pilot of the Hawker Siddeley to fly to Zagreb...
...flight to Tripoli was anticlimactic; guerrillas, crew and passengers were all so hysterically supercharged that a kind of camaraderie took hold. "One of them even served as my steward," reported Claussen later...