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As the gendarmes prepared to make their move, the Airbus started its engines at 4:45 p.m., taxied slowly across the tarmac and stopped within 10 feet of the main terminal. Yahia now issued his final ultimatum: If the plane did not take off by 5 p.m., he said, "we will take action." At 5:08, one of the terrorists fired two shots at the control tower, shattering its bay window. Pasqua immediately gave the green light for the gendarmes' attack.
At 5:17 p.m. the G.I.G.N. unit moved. Approaching the plane from the rear and sides so they could not be seen, three groups of commandos in black ski masks and combat fatigues advanced atop three mobile loading ramps. The first unit, led by Favier, headed for the forward right door, opened its lock and stormed inside, guns blazing. Holed up in the cockpit, the hijackers met them with what Favier later described as "a wall of gunfire" through the door. "It was hell in there!"
Simultaneously, the two other teams entered through the two rear doors, deploying escape chutes and herding passengers out the emergency exits. Paratroopers met them on the tarmac and instructed them to crawl toward the terminal, where the wounded were given emergency treatment, mostly for scrapes and bruises. The rear cabin was filled with smoke, riddled with stray gunfire and rocked by grenade blasts. "The bullets were flying all around me," recounted one passenger, an Algerian merchant marine captain. "We expected death, we were waiting for the explosion," said another Algerian passenger, Ali Kalak. "We never thought there would be such a successful intervention."
Yet somehow most of the hostages managed to keep their heads. A mother traveling with her daughter pushed her child to the floor as soon as she saw the hooded silhouettes of the French commandos. "In spite of the gunshots," she says, "we were reassured by the orders they were shouting to us, the impression that the situation was in hand. We crawled to a rear door, jumped into the void and landed on a chute." Another passenger, traveling with his family, saw a mobile ramp full of gendarmes pass his window and knew an attack was imminent. "I told my wife and children to duck down," he recounts. "There were explosions, gunfire, but we didn't see anything. That's all. I had the impression that it only lasted a quarter of a second." "There was gunfire in every direction," says an Algerian mechanic. "I crawled to the airport building and I looked around me. I saw that my three brothers were alive, and I thanked God."
Up front the firefight continued. Though they were wearing bulletproof vests, the first four commandos to enter the plane were wounded. "Those guys were firing through the walls of the plane -- we received hundreds of rounds in the first minutes," recalled Favier. "I occasionally glimpsed part of the face of one of the shooters through a gap in the door, or a hand that threw a grenade."
Only one of the hijackers' homemade grenades went off, doing little damage. The gendarmes countered with concussion grenades, which temporarily deafen and blind, allowing them to burst into the cockpit and shoot down the terrorists.