ISRAEL: Battle of Flight 517

Sabena Flight 517 from Brussels to Tel Aviv was 20 minutes out of Vienna last week when two Arabs waving pistols rushed the cockpit. "As you can see," Captain Reginald Levy calmly informed his 90 passengers, "we have friends aboard." The friends—the men and two women, who produced explosives from under their skirts—were members of a Palestinian guerrilla organization called Black September.* Their audacious plan: to land the Boeing 707 at Tel Aviv and embarrass Israel by threatening to blow up the plane on a Lod Airport runway unless 317 imprisoned fedayeen...

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