The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks Read online

  There has also been a changing of the guard between terrorist groups and individuals making the list. Although terrorism as a tactic probably cannot be completely eradicated—the existence of evil is part of the human condition—specific terrorist groups have been eliminated, through aging of the principals, their deaths, imprisonment, or maturity beyond their radical youth; changing political fortunes; ending of patron state support; government/private security methods becoming more effective; or other reasons.

  We can see this evolution of worst group identities most clearly in a ranking of groups whose depredations appear in the 50 Worst list. Some groups—radical West European leftists, leftist Palestinians—enjoyed their heydays in the 1970s but then dropped off the list—as they did in more “normal” attacks. Most disturbingly, the religious-based Islamist radicals have shown greater staying power than their leftist forebears, most of whom have become extinct. For the moment, al Qaeda and its affiliates have established themselves as the single worst group of the half-century in terms of conducting the most spectacular terrorist incidents.

  Exclusion of a group from this list does not mean that they were not active, nor a major threat, during this period. Groups such as the Abu Nidal/Black June Organization, the Basque Nation and Liberty, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, and scores of other groups conducted numerous attacks during this period. None of their attacks, however, rose to the level of a 50 Worst event.

  50 Worst by Terrorist Group

  Al Qaeda and Offshoots

  February 26, 1993, World Trade Center Bombing

  August 7, 1998, Tanzania and Kenya U.S. Embassy Bombings

  October 12, 2000, Yemen USS Cole Attack

  September 11, 2001, U.S. World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Pennsylvania Hijackings

  October 12, 2002, Indonesia Bali Bombings

  May 12, 2003, Riyadh Western Complex Bombings

  March 11, 2004, Madrid Train Bombings

  July 7, 2005, U.K. Subway Bombings

  July 11, 2010, Uganda World Cup Bombings

  January 16, 2013, Algerian Gas Plant Takeover

  September 21–24, 2013, Nairobi, Kenya, Westgate Shopping Mall Attack

  Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Offshoots

  September 6, 1970, Dawson’s Field Multiple Aerial Hijackings

  December 21, 1975, Vienna OPEC Hostage-Taking

  June 27, 1976, Entebbe

  October 13, 1977, Landshut Hijacking and GSG 9 Rescue in Mogadishu

  Hizballah

  April 18, 1983, U.S. Embassy in Beirut Bombing

  October 23, 1983, U.S. Marine and French Paratrooper Barracks in Lebanon Bombing

  March 17, 1992, Buenos Aires Israeli Embassy Bombing

  July 18, 1994, AIMA Buenos Aires Bombing

  Chechens

  June 14, 1995, Budennovsk, Russia, Hospital Hostage-Taking

  October 23, 2002, Moscow Theater Takeover

  August 24, 2004, Russian Planes Bombing

  September 1, 2004, Russia Beslan School Takeover

  March 29, 2010, Moscow Subway Bombings

  Black September

  September 5, 1972, Munich Olympics Attack

  European Leftists: Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigades

  October 13, 1977, Landshut Hijacking and GSG 9 Rescue in Mogadishu

  March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro Kidnapping

  Latin American Leftists

  December 17, 1996, Japan Embassy in Peru Takeover

  Irish Republican Army

  August 27, 1979, Mountbatten Assassination

  August 15, 1998, Omagh, Northern Ireland, Bombing

  Japanese Red Army and United Red Army

  March 31, 1970, Japan Airlines Flight 351 Hijacking to North Korea

  May 30, 1972, Machine Gun Attack in Lod Airport

  Indian Nationalists, Leftists, Separatists

  June 23, 1985, Air India Flight Bombing

  Other Palestinian Groups

  May 15, 1974, Ma’alot Massacre

  October 7, 1985, Achille Lauro Seajacking

  April 5, 1986, Berlin La Belle Discotheque Bombing

  September 5, 1986, Pan Am 73 Hijacking

  December 21, 1988, Lockerbie Bombing

  September 19, 1989, French Airline UTA 772 Bombing

  Other Islamists

  October 6, 1981, Egypt President Anwar Sadat Assassination

  November 17, 1997, Luxor Attack

  July 23, 2005, Sharm el-Sheikh Bombing

  November 26, 2008, India Mumbai Attacks

  For anyone obsessed with counting incidents, this list of incidents by terrorist group does not include eight of the 50 Worst incidents. These eight do not easily fit into a group-specific category because of suspect attribution, a single attack by an organization that did not appear again, or tenuous ties of the individual perpetrating the attack to a formal terrorist organization. In addition, one incident—the October 13, 1977, Landshut Hijacking and GSG 9 Rescue in Mogadishu—appears twice on the list, because it was a joint operation. To provide context for the environments in which these attacks took place, discussions of each decade introduce that book section.

  * * *

  The 1960s

  The decade’s worst depredations, while chilling for their time, have all fallen off the overall list for the half-century. A 50 Worst list for the decade of the 1960s could include armed attacks by Algerian insurgents, whose domestic attacks against the continuation of French colonial rule on occasion spilled over into the metropole. Algerian independence was seen by many insurgent theorists as evidence of the possibility of a successful terrorism campaign. Palestinian terrorism, particularly with the establishment of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, began to take root in Israel and the occupied territories, and later spread into the rest of the world by the early 1970s. The decade’s 50 Worst could also include examples from the rash of bombings by leftist groups in the United States—including a failed Weather Underground attempt to bomb the U.S. Capitol—and Western Europe, along with the attacks by various Latin American revolutionary groups encouraged by the success of Fidel Castro’s insurgent takeover of the reins of power in Cuba.

  Many of these groups resorted to aerial hijacking as an excellent method of publicizing their causes by attracting media attention to a telegenic crisis du jour. Copycats, including mentally disturbed individuals, passengers who wanted to upgrade to a first-class flight to Havana, and domestic U.S. black revolutionaries and their white sympathizers, also added to the rolls of the hijackers. The increase of aerial hijackings, which was then viewed by governments as one of the major sources of nonstate threats to the security of its citizens, led to tentative steps by governments to bolster the defensive side of the issue. Hijackings were not yet viewed as a terrorism problem since the majority of attacks were comparatively nonviolent take-me-to-Cuba and take-me-to-Miami capers. From 1968 through 1972, the U.S. Department of Transportation logged 364 hijackings around the world.

  The U.S. administration became fed up after eight planes were hijacked to Cuba in January 1969. The Federal Aviation Administration created the Task Force on the Deterrence of Air Piracy, which developed a hijacker profile for use in screening passengers. Magnetometers (metal detectors) were also introduced at the end of the decade.

  The international community chipped in with several antihijacking conventions. In 1963, International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) drafted the Convention on Offenses and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft (more commonly referred to as the Tokyo Convention), which required states to promptly return hijacked aircraft and passengers. The convention was silent on the fate of the hijackers. The ICAO next met in The Hague, Netherlands, to create the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft (Hague Convention), which called for states to extradite or try hijackers. The convention deemed hijacking a criminal rather than a political act. In December 1970, fifty natio
ns signed on, including the United States. The ICAO also drafted a Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation, which dealt with acts on the ground against aircraft in service. The Montreal Convention was open for signature in 1971 and went into force in 1973.

  Nonterrorist hijackings decreased following the coming into force of the three conventions. Terrorists, however, upped the ante, making their attacks increasingly more deadly and diverting planes to countries whose regimes viewed them as conducting legitimate political acts, vice terrorist attacks, and thus making the conventions irrelevant to the episode at hand.

  * * *

  The 1970s

  Many of the 50 Worst of the 1970s involved some form of hostage-taking, including classical kidnapping in which the perpetrators and their hostage(s) move from the original scene of the crime, barricade-and-hostage operations in which the terrorists and their hostage(s) stay put during the bargaining, and aerial, train, vehicular, and naval hijacking, a melding of the previous two types of hostage incidents.

  As had been the case in the 1960s, the terrorist spectaculars tended to take place in affluent countries or in capitals with a large media presence that guaranteed coverage of the exploits of the terrorists. News outlets quickly acceded to their demands for publicity of their manifestoes. The terrorists of the 1970s wanted a lot of people watching. They succeeded. The majority (88%) of international terrorist attacks during this period involved no deaths; only 16 percent involved injuries.

  The international community’s response to these new types of attacks was mixed. Nations directly affected by hostage-taking soon created elite military units designed to conduct daring rescue operations.

  The United Nations created a 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, including Diplomatic Agents (informally known as the Diplomat Convention). The United Nations went through several fits and starts at drafting a companion International Convention against the Taking of Hostages. Regional efforts included the 1971 Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish the Acts of Terrorism Taking the Form of Crimes against Persons and Related Extortion that Are of International Significance (the OAS Convention) and the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism. States sympathetic to various terrorist groups limited the effectiveness of these agreements by raising questions about the definitions of terrorism and hostage-taking, the rights of freedom fighters, extradition and the right of asylum, and sovereignty and territorial integrity.

  Foot-dragging on international legal conventions and regional accords was the first stage of a continuum of state support to terrorists, became increasingly worrisome in the 1970s. Allegations of Soviet Union and communist satellite support to Western European and Palestinian revolutionary terrorists were matched by charges against radical Middle Eastern regimes supporting any and all Palestinian terrorist groups. Many terrorist groups, including those who engaged in the sensational incidents that made the 50 Worst for the decade, benefited from and often owed their existence to the provision of funds, documentation, training, safe haven, arms, explosives, planning, insurance policies for terrorists’ families, and other forms of assistance by governments and wealthy nonstate backers. Various sanctions against these patrons led to little change; what change there was usually entailed the support becoming more clandestine and tougher to monitor.

  Most of the 50 Worst from this decade were attributable to the nexus between the West European leftists and the radical Palestinians. Many of the groups cross-trained, shared arms, and even joined each other in collaborative hit teams. The decade also saw a hint of what was to come from Islamist-based terrorist groups with attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tehran and Mecca.

  March 31, 1970

  Japan Airlines Flight 351 Hijacking to North Korea

  Overview: The Japanese United Red Army (URA) and its splinter groups in the late 1960s and 1970s were among the most feared terrorist groups in the world. Led by Fusako Shigenobu (who became one of the few prominent female terrorists of her generation, along with Petra Kraus, Ulrike Meinhof, and Leila Khaled), the group initially spread terror in its homeland before offering its services to revolutionaries throughout the world. Members of the newly formed Japanese Red Army (JRA) went on to develop a partnership with George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), conducting joint and contract attacks for the PFLP. Its membership eventually was picked off by authorities in a worldwide manhunt.

  The group came to international attention with the daring hijacking to North Korea of a Japan Airlines (JAL) plane. Its profile increased with machine-gun attacks in airports, bombings, counterfeiting, trafficking in women, and other criminal activities. While playing high-stakes hostage negotiation gambits, the group’s attack squads generally had an exit strategy and did not seek martyrdom for Marx.

  Incident: On March 31, 1970, a JAL B-727 left Tokyo for Fukuoka, but was hijacked shortly after a 7:30 a.m. takeoff by nine members, ages 16 to 27, of the Japanese URA (Sekigun-ha, Red Army Faction), who wielded samurai swords, daggers, pistols, and pipe bombs and demanded to be flown to Pyongyang, North Korea. The plane carried 3 crew, 4 stewardesses, and 122 passengers, mostly Japanese, including tourists, businessmen, students, a Roman Catholic Maryknoll priest, doctors on their way to a three-day medical conference in Fukuoka, and two Americans, including Herbert Brill. The terrorists tied up the male passengers, while others passed out candy to the children on board. They tied copilot Teiichi Ezaki to his seat. The pilot, Captain Shinji Ishida, claimed that the plane could not reach North Korea without refueling and landed at Itazuke air base outside Fukuoka at 8:59 a.m. Negotiations continued for five hours; the group allowed 12 children, 10 women, and an ailing elderly man to leave the plane in exchange for refueling. Two escort jets accompanied the plane as it left the air base.

  The South Koreans attempted to give the impression to the hijackers that the plane had entered North Korean airspace. They fired antiaircraft shells at the plane, scrambled fighter planes, and escorted it to an airfield that identified itself as Pyongyang but was really Kimpo Airport in Seoul. The airport was disguised to look like what Pyongyang might possibly look like, with soldiers and policeman dressed in communist uniforms. Girls sung greetings, and a bullhorn called for them to enter North Korea. The terrorists saw through the ruse when they spotted an American car parked nearby, as well as a U.S. Northwest Airlines plane and a U.S. Air Force DC-3 parked on the runways. The officials could not produce a photograph of Kim Il Sung and were tripped up on several points of communist dogma. The group threatened to blow up the plane if any more attempts to end the hijacking were made.

  The plane was moved to a corner of the airfield. The hijackers flicked the passenger cabin lights continually during the night in an attempt to demoralize the occupants. They also denied attempts to send food aboard, accepting only a few sandwiches. When mechanics wheeled a battery cart near one of the engines, the group interpreted this as meaning that the authorities would try to dismantle one of the engines. The hijackers again threatened to set off the pipe bombs that two of them were carrying. Japanese officials had identified two of the group as wanted on explosives charges—Takamaro Tamiya, 27, the group’s leader, and Tsuneo Umeuchi, a medical student—which gave credibility to the threat.

  The following day the temperature in the cabin rose to 107 degrees, and the hijackers allowed food, water, cigarettes, and blankets on board. They had also let slip their 8:00 A.M. deadline for clearance to fly out of Seoul. They were often extremely agitated and gave the impression that they were serious about harming the passengers despite their general politeness. Japanese Ambassador Masahide Kanayama urged caution on the part of the South Koreans.

  Japanese vice minister of transportation Shinjiro Yamamura flew to Seoul to negotiate with the hijackers, along with the ambassador, who had established radio contact with the hijackers, the captain, and two of the passengers. Yamamura of
fered to become a substitute hostage. When they learned of Yamamura’s plan, the South Koreans objected. The hijackers agreed to allow the plane to be moved to a takeoff position, to allow passenger baggage to be removed, to release 50 passengers, to allow Yamamura to board, and to then release the other 50, at which time the plane would fly to North Korea.

  During the flight to North Korea, Pyongyang made ominous warnings about the possible incarceration and torture of the hostages. The plane never reached Pyongyang airport but landed in North Korean territory. The hijackers bounded from the plane and struck karate poses, acting as heroes. The North Koreans confiscated their weapons and separated them from the hostages, who were questioned in a local hotel. The communists announced that the hijackers would be given political asylum. On Saturday, they informed Yamamura and the crew that they were illegal immigrants. Yamamura had heard reports from former hijack victims that they had been beaten while held in North Korea and also recalled that the crew of the USS Pueblo was still being held. However, his group was allowed to leave. The jet returned to Tokyo on April 5. On April 6, North Korean broadcasts called the hijackers “strangers who came uninvited.”

  Sources differ as to the identity of the hijackers. During the attack, the 16-year-old identified himself as “Boya,” who had played hooky from Kobe High School that day. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) identified the group as O. Takeshi, W. Mariaki, A. Shiro, S. Yasumiro, K. Takahiro, A. Kimihiro, Takamaro Tamiya, 27, Yoshizo Tanaka, 25, and Kintaro Yoshida, 24. Various sources claim that Kozo Okamoto, a brother of a hijacker, was involved in the Lod Airport massacre on May 30, 1972.