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While the 727 circled the Yugoslav airport, the skyjackers broadcast a new demand—that the three prisoners be flown to Zagreb and released there. Meanwhile the Germans had worked out a set of conditions. If possible, they wanted the skyjackers arrested "without endangering the passengers and crew" of the jet. If that was not feasible, they told Yugoslav officials, the three prisoners were to be exchanged for the hostages. But if the skyjackers would not agree to the terms, the prisoners were to be returned to West Germany. In preparation for the deal, Lufthansa Board Chairman Herbert Culmann and the three prisoners boarded a Hawker Siddeley executive jet, which was to remain in West German airspace until the terrorists agreed to a direct swap.
The skyjackers, who were determined not to release the Lufthansa plane or its passengers until the released prisoners were safely in Libya, refused to accept any arrangement. Instead, they ordered Claussen to keep flying over Yugoslavia until the prisoners landed in Zagreb. Fuel ran so low that the captain had to cut off two of his three engines; if the third one shut down, the terrorists warned, they would simply blow up the plane in the sky.
Claussen meanwhile was urgently arguing against the German reluctance to accept the Arab terms. "The situation is getting more and more serious," he radioed at one point. "They really mean it. Get on with it, man." Later he implored: "Will you believe me that they've got it set in their heads that their three comrades come on board my plane without anybody being released?" Aloft over West Germany, Lufthansa's Culmann finally decided that the situation represented a "supra-legal emergency." Without consulting Bonn, he ordered the pilot of the Hawker Siddeley to fly to Zagreb and agreed to make the exchange on Arab terms. Moments after his plane touched down, the terrorists allowed Claussen to land the 727; less than a minute's fuel remained in the plane's tanks. On the ground, the Arabs were adamant that the 727 be refueled for the flight to Libya, and announced that plane and occupants would be blown up unless it was done. Unable to contact his foreign office, Kurt Laqueur, Bonn's consul general in Zagreb, agreed to the refueling. "I didn't want to play with the lives of the passengers," he explained later.
The flight to Tripoli was anticlimactic; guerrillas, crew and passengers were all so hysterically supercharged that a kind of camaraderie took hold. "One of them even served as my steward," reported Claussen later.
But the repercussions from the escapade are far from over. Critics of Chancellor Willy Brandt, who is in the midst of a tough re-election battle against the Christian Democrats, charged that the decision to release the prisoners was a "humiliation" for West Germany. Actually, Bonn was almost eager to hand over the three fedayeen; like political lightning rods, they have invited reprisals ever since the night they were captured in a gun battle at an airfield outside Munich.