Lady Hijacker

Leila Khaled, the first female hijacker.

 

     Leila Khaled grabbed the attention of the whole world, when she led a group of PFLP freedom fighters onboard the TWA flight 840 in 1969. They proceeded to hijack the plane, believing Yitzhak Rabin (the Israeli ambassador to the US) would be on board. They instead diverted the Boeing 707 to land in Damascus. Nobody was killed and the passengers all safely disembarked. Leaving the hijackers to blow up the nose of the plane as it sat on the tarmac. 

 

   That same year, the Black September campaign in Jordan saw her alight one of the four simultaneous Dawson's Field hijackings. The international press were taken with this attractive, brave young heroine. She found herself in a British prison, before being traded in a prisoner exchange for civilian hostages kidnapped by other PFLP members. 

  Upon her return to Damascus where she lived as a refugee, she immediately became an icon among the Palestinian refugees. Khaled's notoriety meant that her image joined that of Che Guevara on thousands of left wing walls, and to many she became the archetype of the female revolutionary and the Palestinian woman. An epidemic of hijacking during the 1970s, would be documented in author Brendan Koerner's book "The Skies Belong to Us".

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