Twa Flight 840 Hijacking

The hijacking of Trans World Airlines Flight 840 brought the Palestinian guerrilla Leila Khaled, who became an icon in the Arab world, to international attention.

On August 29, 1969, Khaled and Salim Issawi, hijackers for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), took over the Rome-to-Tel Aviv flight. Khaled had boarded Flight 840 wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a book called My Friend Che (about her hero Che Guevara) in hand. Not long after takeoff, she and Issawi, armed with grenades, jumped from their first-class seats and stormed the cockpit. By Khaled's account, she pulled the safety pin from her grenade and offered it to the pilot as a souvenir; he declined. They re-routed the plane to Damascus, Syria. Khaled forced the pilot to fly low over Haifa, the town (now a part of Israel) that she and her family fled from in 1948 to become refugees in Lebanon. After landing in Damascus, Issawi and Khaled evacuated the passengers and crew and blew up the plane's cockpit. The hijackers were arrested and held in Syria for five weeks, and then released.

A photo of the 25-year-old Khaled, snapped the day of the hijacking, captured the world's imagination. The 1970s press often referred to her as “girl terrorist” and “deadly beauty.” The hijackers used the takeover of Flight 840 and Khaled's instant notoriety to bring attention to their Marxist-Leninist organization, the PFLP, which was founded in 1967 following Israel's capture of the West Bank in the Six-Day War.

After hijacking Flight 840, Khaled underwent many plastic surgery operations, altering her face so that she could slip through airport security undetected. In 1970 she hijacked (with the Nicaraguan Patrick Arguello) an El Al jet from Amsterdam, charging the cockpit midflight, grenades in hand. Armed guards opened fire, killing Arguello, and they captured Khaled. The plane landed at Heathrow Airport, and Khaled was held in England for 28 days, until being released in exchange for western hostages held by the PFLP.

Following the September 6, 1970, El Al hijacking, Jordan erupted in violence. On the same day as Khaled's attempt, Palestinian hijackers took three other planes. King Hussein of Jordan cited these incidents and declared war on the Palestinian groups in Jordan, creating the fighting that has become known as “Black September.”

In 2006, Khaled's story was documented by Swedish filmmaker Lina Makboul in a film called Leila Khaled, Hijacker, which won the best film award at India's Tri-Continental Film Festival, and Sweden's Nojesguiden Gothenburg Festival.