It was one of the deadliest hijackings in history: 125 of the 175 people aboard the Addis Ababa-to-Nairobi flight last week perished. The wonder was that anyone survived. The three men who rushed the cockpit 20 minutes into the flight seemed crazed, hopped up. One of them clutched a fire ax, another a fire extinguisher; the third brandished a paper-wrapped “bomb” in one hand and swigged from a bottle of Black and White Scotch with the other. They said they were antigovernment former soldiers who had broken out of jail. They demanded to go to Australia. They dragged the copilot out of his chair and beat him; one played with the controls, dipping the plane dangerously. When the pilot warned that fuel was low and began to circle Grand Comore, part of a tiny island nation off Mozambique, they tried to crash the plane. Asked why they didn’t simply commit suicide at home, one replied: “We want to make history.”
Ethiopian is considered one of Africa’s few truly world-class airlines, and the pilot upheld that distinction by putting the jetliner down on the only spot within miles where help was available. On the beach, the hotel’s sports director radioed in all the resort’s fast rubber dive boats to fish out survivors. Some were rescued even sooner by guests on Windsurfers. The hotel nurse turned an open-air restaurant into a triage station, staffed by eight vacationing French doctors and two South Africans. By the time locals began looting the wreckage, many of the injured were on their way to the hospital. The pilots survived; all three hijackers died.
