Word: hijackings
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From his mosque in Virginia, Magid, like many of the some 600 full-time imams across the country, is fighting his own war against radicals trying to hijack his religion. For Magid that has meant not only condemning terrorism but also working closely with the FBI in battling it. He regularly opens doors for agents trying to cultivate contacts in his Muslim community, and he alerts the bureau when suspicious persons approach his congregation. That puts him in a precarious position: How does he maintain credibility as a spiritual adviser while, in effect, he is informing on fellow Muslims...
...September, negotiations to obtain the crew's release had foundered. The hijackers had increased their ransom demand and reneged on an agreement to allow the rice to be handed over to the Somali government. When the Semlow's generator ran out of oil, the pirates accused the crew of hoarding it. One Somali fired a shot through the window on the bridge. "We thought this trip was the end of our lives," remembered able seaman Rashid Juma Mwatuga, 42. In late September the Ibn Batuta, an Egyptian ship carrying cement, appeared on the horizon. "The pirates told me they were...
Ever since commercial airliners first became a serious target of international terrorism in 1968, the world has feared the specter of a planeload of innocent people being destroyed, by either design or accident, in the course of a hijack drama. Over and over, at airports in the Middle East--and notably at Entebbe in Uganda and at Mogadishu in Somalia--the specter had been miraculously dispelled, the lives of innocents spared. The latest hijacking ended far more disastrously. Because of the demonstrated savagery of this particular band of terrorists, and perhaps because of mistakes made by well-intentioned governments...
...image that summed up the frustrations engendered by the terrorists' rampage was an airplane: TWA Flight 847, helplessly ferrying its 153 captives around the Mediterranean after being taken over by two Muslim Shi'ite extremists. The U.S. endured 17 days of prime-time humiliation before the last 39 American hijack victims were released. One American, Navy Diver Robert Stethem, was killed...
Controversy immediately erupted over the event's outcome, but there was near unanimity about the virtue of the rescue mission itself. President Reagan somberly supported the decision to go in. So did the hijack survivors, including Pilot Hani Galal, who had told the tower at Valletta, "Please do something. They're going to kill us all." The same shock coupled with somber understanding had accompanied an anti-terrorist assault 17 days earlier in Bogotá, Colombia, where at least two dozen terrorists died, along with nearly 100 hostages...