It was a cloudless evening late last week when Iraqi Airways Flight 006 lifted off from Beirut International Airport bound for Baghdad. Aboard the Caravelle jet were 74 passengers and eight crew members, none expecting much more than a smooth hop to the Iraqi capital. Suddenly, Israeli Phantom jets pounced, ordering the helpless captain to fly instead to a military airbase near Haifa. He obeyed. As he told Beirut Control: "I don't want a repeat of the Libyan thing," in which Israeli jets last February shot down a Libyan airliner over the...
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