Word: valletta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...charred doors obscenely ajar and its windows darkened by soot, the burned-out hulk of a Boeing 737 was all that remained of EgyptAir Flight 648, once bound from Athens to Cairo with 98 passengers and crewmen aboard. As investigators milled about on the tarmac of the airport at Valletta, Malta's capital, police and rescuers sifted through the fuselage for victims, their possessions and any clue that might help explain what had happened aboard the ill-fated craft. Occasionally a stretcher shrouded in plastic would emerge, a macabre reminder that the jetliner had become a tomb for 57 travelers...
...This time he moved briskly, sending a team of 80 specially trained commandos to Malta even as he placed his armed forces on alert and bolstered his defenses along the Libyan border. He authorized the commando operation only after the plane's captain, Hani Galal, told the tower at Valletta: "Please do something. They're going to kill...
...only hope of answering those questions may lie in the interrogation of the one of two hijackers who survived. One of the men was identified by Maltese authorities as Omar Marzouki, a 20-year-old Tunisian. At week's end Marzouki was known to be at a hospital in Valletta, recovering from gunshot wounds in the chest and abdomen, and could not be questioned. Although he was under heavy guard, Egyptian security officials feared he might be targeted for assassination by his mysterious mentors. In the meantime the Egyptians requested his extradition, a move that they expected Malta to honor...
Another aircraft brought the new, aggressive response into focus: an EgyptAir Boeing 737 with the hawk-faced image of Horus, the ancient Egyptian god of the sky, emblazoned on its tail. Late in November, Egyptian commandos stormed the aircraft at Valletta's Luqa International Airport on Malta in a bid to rescue 79 passengers and crew aboard who had survived 24 hours of horror. When the rescue mission was over, three Palestinian hijackers were dead, but so were 60 travelers...
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...