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Meanwhile, the terrorists warned that they would blow up the plane if any rescue attempt was made. They refused a request that women and children be allowed to disembark.
Airport officials worried that the small auxiliary generator hooked up to the plane might not be powerful enough to run its air-conditioning system properly—and temperatures under Dubai's hot sun rose as high as 102° during the first day of captivity. Said a police officer: "They must really be cooking out there now." Another problem was sanitation: when Palestinians in September 1970 forced three foreign jets to land in the Jordanian desert (and eventually blew them up), a major complaint by the hostages was the overflowing toilets on board.
At week's end, there was still no clear word from the terrorists about their aims, except a demand for the release of Kozo Okamoto, the only survivor of the three-man Japanese murder team that carried out last year's massacre at Lod. His two companions were killed; Okamoto was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment by an Israeli court. (At the time, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz made a disturbingly prophetic argument for executing Okamoto: "As long as the Japanese murderer is in Israeli hands, he becomes an operational objective, an invitation for murder and extortion against Israel and its citizens." In light of Israel's long-established practice of not yielding to blackmail, Okamoto's release was unlikely. At one point during the 747's long flight, Israeli controllers indirectly passed a warning to the pilot that the aircraft would be shot down if it invaded Israeli airspace.
In Tokyo, Japanese were once again caught up in the mood of mingled shame and rage that appeared after the Lod catastrophe. Said shocked Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka: "This is terrible. The government will do all in its power to assure the safety of the passengers." At Tokyo International Airport, worried relatives waited for news. But as the week ended, from the 747 sweltering in the sun at Dubai came word only that the terrorists were "waiting for instructions." From whom? No one knew.