(4 of 5)
"After the third shooting," Captain Galal said later, "I was prepared to do anything to prevent more killing." The terrorists, he added, "were very desperate and bloodthirsty people who would not hesitate to blow up the plane." Curiously, the request for fuel was the only demand the hijackers made, although they did ask to speak to the Libyan Ambassador, who talked to them from the control tower and shortly thereafter, at the request of his government, left for Libya. Said a Western diplomat in Malta: "The most unusual thing about this is that the hijackers made no political demands or political statements. They just asked for fuel." One possible explanation for their reticence: they were waiting for instructions from their superiors that never arrived.
In the meantime, the Egyptian government was making plans. Before dawn Sunday, Mubarak dispatched to Malta a C-130 Hercules transport carrying 80 commandos of Egypt's elite 777 unit. The Maltese, who do not have such a unit, had accepted Mubarak's offer. According to some reports, U.S. antiterrorist experts were also enroute to Malta but did not arrive before the storming of the plane. Around that time, Mubarak also placed his army on alert and moved additional troops into the Western desert near the Libyan border.
Aboard the 737, the hijackers were growing edgy. The Maltese had previously sent food onto the plane, but decided not to send any more until the nine children among the passengers had been released. This the gunmen refused to do. Galal had to be careful what he said to the tower, because the chief hijacker spoke English. But late in the afternoon, when the hijacker left the cockpit to use the toilet, the captain issued his emphatic call for help. Tony Lyons, an Australian passenger, knew that his passport was next on the pile. "I was resigned to the fact that I was going to be shot," he said later.
By midmorning the Egyptian C-130 had arrived at Malta's airport. The authorities ordered it parked in a remote corner, far from the hijacked 737. Finally, at 9:15 p.m. Cairo time Sunday, Mubarak ordered the assault. Five minutes later, six Egyptian commandos, divided into three two-man teams, stormed the plane. Two commandos were ordered to blast their way into the cabin from the baggage compartment, while the other teams were instructed to force their way through the front and rear cabin doors and shoot the hijackers.
Yet in the next 90 seconds the plan to rescue the passengers resulted in the deaths of most of them. As Captain Ibrahim Dahroug entered the plane, a hijacker hurled a grenade at him, severing his leg below the knee. The commandos killed at least one more hijacker in a gun battle. By that time the various explosions caused by the Egyptians' entry, and probably also by the hijackers' grenades, had ignited plastic cabin material, thereby releasing toxic fumes. Recalled Lyons: "All of a sudden there were grenades, a lot of shooting, then fire in the fuselage--thick, acrid smoke that choked you when you tried to breathe. I stumbled over people, fell out the door and down the stairs onto the tarmac."