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Several of the released passengers then boarded the first plane they could catch out of Beirut, a Middle East Airlines flight to nearby Cyprus. But as the Lebanese Boeing 707 landed there, a young Palestinian, producing a hand grenade, threatened to blow up the plane as a protest against the earlier Shi'ite hijacking. He soon surrendered to the plane's captain, however, after being granted his request to fly to Amman aboard a Jordanian airliner.
On board both the hijacked Jordanian plane and the hijacked Lebanese plane were Professor Landry Slade, an American who is serving as an acting dean of the American University of Beirut, and his teenage son William. "It wasn't bad," the younger Slade remarked, after he and the other passengers had been released in Cyprus, "but it isn't something we want to talk about." Two days later, when he learned of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, Landry Slade told reporters, "God help them all. I know what it's like." Professor Slade was, in fact, a good deal luckier than his colleague Thomas Sutherland, 54, dean of the American University's agriculture and food sciences faculty. Sutherland had been kidnaped earlier in the week as he was riding in a six-car convoy from Beirut airport to his campus home. He thus became the seventh American and the twelfth Westerner currently being held by various extremist groups in Lebanon.
In that troubled country, as usual, superlatives were insufficient to describe the scene. The fighting in the refugee camps between Palestinians and Shi'ites spread to other parts of West Beirut. On Friday morning, a shell struck a vegetable market there, killing or wounding 50 people. Two suicide bombers crashed an explosives-laden car into a Lebanese Army position, killing 23 and wounding 36. Since the victims were mostly from the predominantly Shi'ite Sixth Brigade, reports had it that the bombers were Sunni Muslims, who have sided with the Palestinians in the current struggle, and view with apprehension the Shi'ites' lust for a greater share of political power. The Shi'ites and the Druze were allies until about a month ago, but last week they were shooting at each other after a group of Amal militiamen tried to stop a car loaded with Druze. Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt agreed to a cease-fire but later, when asked how long it would last, replied, "Only God and Syria know." Given all these circumstances, Syrian President Hafez Assad was content to let the rival factions in Lebanon fight on for a while before he risks his own troops to try to restore order.
In Lebanon, the Israeli forces were largely gone, but the impasse continued between the United Nations peacekeeping forces and the Israeli-backed, predominantly Christian militia known as the South Lebanon Army. Two weeks ago, the S.L.A. had seized 25 Finnish soldiers of the U.N. force, released three of them and taken the others to the Christian town of Marjayoun. It refused to let them go until eleven of its own members had been handed over by the Shi'ite Amal militia. The S.L.A. accused the U.N. force, which does not recognize the S.L.A. as an independent militia and customarily disarms its members whenever they try to pass through U.N. lines, of having captured the eleven S.L.A. members and turned them over to Amal. The Shi'ite militia, in turn, claimed that the eleven S.L.A. members had defected to their side.