Basically the story goes like this.
Air France conducts flights to Algeria from Paris.The crew and
pilots are volunteers as i have read, reason being is Algeria was
in a state of civil war during that time.An Islamic political party
wanted to take control over Algeria and transform it into an
Islamic state, by hook or by crook.
The 4 hijackers disguised as presidential police and they entered
the plane. They began inspecting the passengers' passports and
demanded that the passengers close all of the window shutters and
empty their personal belongings into black plastic bags. After
"inspecting", they refused to leave the plane and immediately
revealed themselves as not real policemen, but hijackers. Twenty
five year old Abdul Abdullah Yahia and the other three members of
the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé, or GIA) brandished
their AK-47 and Uzi automatic weapons and demanded cooperation from
the 220 passengers and 12 flight crew.
At 14:00, one of the hijackers discovered that there was an
Algerian policeman onboard the flight and quickly brought him to
the attention of Yahia. The hijackers dragged the passenger up to
the front of the passenger compartment and shot him in the back of
the head. A few minutes later the hijackers made contact with the
control tower and demanded that the plane be allowed to take off.
After their initial request was not met, they dumped the body of
the Algerian police officer onto the runway and stated that if
their demands were not immediately met, they would execute another
hostage.
Philippe Legorjus, the Chief Security consultant for Air France and
former team leader of the GIGN, was on the phone with the commander
of the Algerian Army's commando force, which had the Airbus A300
surrounded. The hijackers wanted the Algerian Army to remove the
mobile stairway and tire chocks to allow them to take off, but the
Algerians were not going to give in very easily. A crisis
management team assembled in Paris at the corporate headquarters of
Air France decided that the best choice was to let the plane take
off toward France, to allow the GIGN to intervene.
French Prime Minister Édouard Balladur asked that the women and
children be released in return for allowing the aircraft to fly to
Paris. The GIA agreed to these terms and released 63 passengers.
However when the order was given to the Algerian colonel to have
his men remove the staircase and chocks, he refused. The enraged
hijackers executed a Vietnamese diplomat and threw his body onto
the runway. An Air France flight attendant on duty at the time
later recounted that the hijackers had mistaken him as a "Buddhist
with diplomas" instead of a diplomat who happened to be a Buddhist,
and he had also made the further mistake of taking several bottles
of wine with him when the terrorists summoned him.
The negotiations lasted throughout Christmas Day, but remained at a
stalemate between the Algerian elite commandos surrounding the
aircraft, and the Algerian and French governments, who wanted a
GIGN unit to assist the Algerian Elite Commandos. At 21:30
Christmas night, a young employee of the French embassy came on the
radio and said that the hijackers were going to kill him if they
didn't let the plane take off in thirty minutes. Still at a
standstill with the Algerian colonel, the hijackers kept their word
and at 22:00 they shot the employee in the head and dumped him out.
The GIA stated that they were going to kill one person every half
hour until the plane was allowed to fly to Paris.
During the intense standoff, authorities learned that the aircraft
was laden with more than twenty sticks of dynamite. Captain Denis
Favier of the French GIGN put together a plan to storm the plane
and kill the hijackers with minimum loss of life to the passengers.
The team trained on an identical French Airbus until they were
confident that they could implement their attempts on Flight 8969.
After leaving, the Airbus containing the hostage rescue teams flew
to Algiers but was not given clearance to land. After circling for
more than two hours, the aircraft was diverted to land in Spain to
await further instructions.
After nearly forty hours of intense negotiations and the loss of
three lives, the Algerian Colonel gave in and removed the mobile
staircase and wheel chocks at 02:00 the morning of December 26th.
The negotiation team chose to divert the flight to Marseille
International Airport, some five hundred miles south of Paris. Air
traffic controllers in the tower secretly communicated to the crew
of Flight 8969 to tell the hijackers that they didn't have enough
fuel to make it all the way to Paris; the plane had also used up
too much fuel by running its generators during the standoff in
Algiers.
The French special forces left Spain and landed just twenty minutes
before 8969 touched down at Marseille-Marignane Airport, on the
coast of France, just after 03:30. Tired from the two day stand
off, the hijackers maintained radio silence until late morning when
the hijackers demand they receive nearly 27 tons of fuel;
considerably more than the 9 needed to make the five hundred mile
flight to Paris. It was suspected that the hijackers wanted as much
fuel as possible in order to make the Airbus into a flying bomb;
the concern was that GIA planned to either fly the plane into the
Eiffel Tower in Paris, or simply blow it up over the city.
Wikipedia.org
