Word: karachi
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...