Word: mashhad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...President was soon smiling and bantering with his guest, the highest Iranian official to visit Moscow since the days of the Shah. In two meetings, the two sides signed four agreements providing for, among other things, a new rail link between Soviet Turkmenistan and the northern Iranian city of Mashhad, which would help fulfill a longtime Moscow goal of greater access to the Persian Gulf. There were discussions, but no final accord, on reopening a gas pipeline from Iran to Soviet Transcaucasia, which was shut down in 1980. Moscow also announced that it would aid Iran in "strengthening ((its)) defense...
That operation had been the longest continuous skyjacking in history, a terror-filled 15-day epic that began with the capture of the plane as it neared the gulf and continued during stops at the Iranian city of Mashhad and the Cypriot city of Larnaca before reaching a seven-day standoff in Algiers. For many of the 31 hostages inside the aircraft, the tipoff to approaching | freedom came when the hijackers began systematically wiping overhead compartments and doorways to erase their fingerprints. Then, following a plan apparently worked out in advance with Algerian negotiators, they quietly left the aircraft...
...Flight 422 stretched into its second week and gained distinction as the longest uninterrupted skyjacking ever.* After the airliner, en route from Bangkok to Kuwait, was seized on April 5 as it neared the Strait of Hormuz, it began a tortured 3,200-mile journey that took it from Mashhad in northeastern Iran to Larnaca, Cyprus, and finally to Algiers. Deadlines came and went as the skyjackers, having already killed two hostages, threatened the lives of the rest if Kuwait did not meet their demand to free 17 terrorists jailed there since 1983 for bombings of the U.S. and French...
...taking of Flight 422 exacerbated tensions throughout the Middle East. Syria, which has backed Iran in the gulf conflict, apparently infuriated Tehran by refusing to let the hijacked jetliner land in Damascus after it left Mashhad; at the same time, the skyjacking deepened the split between Iran and the P.L.O. The incident seemed somehow familiar: after the TWA hijacking in 1985, Thomas Cullins, one of the American hostages, noted that "we're pawns in an incredibly complex political and religious movement." The pawns were different last week, but the game had not changed...
About 40 people, including the six to eight hijackers, remained aboard the Kuwait Airways jet. It was commandeered eight days ago on a flight from Bangkok to Kuwait and spent three days at Mashhad, Iran. It was subsequently allowed to land at Larnaca because it was running out of fuel...