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At one point the man approached a passenger who turned out to be an Egyptian security agent, Medhat Mustafa Kamal. The agent produced a pistol and shot and killed the hijacker. In the ensuing fire fight, the other hijackers shot and wounded the agent and two stewardesses. Panicked, the passengers dived for cover. The shots pierced the fuselage, causing the plane to lose pressure. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, and Captain Galal began an emergency descent from 35,000 ft. to 14,000 ft. One of the terrorists ordered him to fly to Libya, but Galal convinced him that, with the plane damaged and fuel limited, it was unsafe to attempt to fly farther than Malta. At first the tower at Malta's Luqa International Airport refused to let the Egyptian airliner land, but authorities relented after Captain Galal told them that he was in imminent danger of crashing into the sea because he was nearly out of fuel. Even so, the runway lights were still off and Galal, with a gun barrel at his head, had to rely on his plane's landing lights to pierce the darkness as he touched down. The tower ordered him to taxi to a remote parking area; four police buses then blocked both ends of the airstrip.
Describing themselves only as "Egypt's revolutionaries," the hijackers threatened to begin killing passengers at regular intervals unless the Maltese agreed to refuel the plane. Meanwhile, in response to an appeal from the pilot, the hijackers agreed to release eleven women, including the seven Filipino dancers and four Egyptians. Then they asked any Israeli women to identify themselves. Thinking she too would be released, Tamar Artzi, 24, rose from her seat. One of the hijackers aimed his pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. At the last second Artzi turned her head; miraculously, the bullet only grazed her cheek. Thinking her dead or mortally wounded, the gunmen threw her out of the plane onto the tarmac.
Her traveling companion, Nitzan Mendelson, 23, was less fortunate. She stayed in her seat when the hijackers began searching for her, but they managed to identify her from her passport photo. With her hands tied, she was dragged to the open doorway, where she too was shot in the head and thrown onto the runway. Beneath the plane, the wounded Artzi crawled toward her friend's body, but one of the hijackers saw her and shot her in the hip. "They shot us as a sport," she said later, "as though they were shooting dogs." Mendelson never regained consciousness, and three days later was pronounced clinically dead.
Next on the neatly stacked pile of passports was that of Patrick Scott Baker, 28, of White Salmon, Wash. Baker remarked later that one hijacker, upon first seeing the young American's passport, had smiled and said in English, "Welcome." To himself Baker thought, "Welcome to my nightmare." Like the Israeli women, Baker was shot in the head and dumped onto the runway. But like Artzi, he received only a superficial wound. He pretended to be dead, waited for the hijackers to go back inside, and then escaped. The next victims were Rogenkamp, a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force in Greece, who was shot and killed, and another American woman, Jackie Pflug, 30, a teacher at the Cairo American College, who was also shot but is expected to recover. Each time the leader of the hijackers shot a passenger, he danced and sang and made jokes to his comrades.