Free The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks by Edward Mickolus, Susan L. Simmons Page A

one count of naturalization fraud and six counts of making false statements in naturalization proceedings in 2005 and 2006. Also charged were Santiago Alvarez and Osvaldo Mitat, after they refused to testify before a grand jury. They were serving prison sentences on a weapons case. The prosecution said a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant claimed that Posada had entered the United States on the Santrina , a shrimping boat manned by Alvarez, Mitat, and others. On April 8, 2011, a jury acquitted him of all charges.
    Lugo, who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the bombing campaign, was released in 1993 after 17 years in prison.
    An FBI document filed in the case on May 4, 2007, suggested that the bombing might have been planned in Guatemala.
October 13, 1977
Landshut Hijacking and GSG 9 Rescue in Mogadishu
    Overview: By the late 1970s, cooperation between rejectionist Palestinians and leftist European terrorists had reached a high point. Joint training, weapons exchanges, operational insights, and trading of operational personnel freely flowed among the various wings of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), West German Baader-Meinhof Group and other German leftists, Italian Red Brigades, Irish Republican Army (IRA), Petra Kraus Group, Basque Nation and Liberty, and a host of other now-forgotten organizations. But government forces were similarly banding together against the terrorists, with quick reaction elite forces sharing training, tactics, and doctrine. The Israeli success at Entebbe led to numerous special operations teams armed with clipboards and light weapons to learn the lessons of the Israelis. They were put into practice in October 1977, when a West German team traveled thousands of miles to conduct a similarly daring rescue of its citizens from hijackers. The Entebbe and Landshut rescues led terrorists to all but abandon high-profile aerial hijacking sieges.
    Incident: On October 13, 1977, Lufthansa flight 181, a B-737 (called a Landshut) scheduled to fly from the Spanish resort island of Mallorca to Frankfurt, was hijacked 55 minutes after takeoff. Two women hijackers reached into their boots, withdrew guns and hand grenades, and along with two male accomplices, diverted the plane to Rome. On board were 82 passengers and 5 crew. Hostages included a Spanish flight crew, Swedish passengers, an Austrian flight attendant, four West German crew, six West German beauty queens, and two Americans.
    Two hijackers identified themselves as Harda Mamoud and Walter Mohammed, who appeared to be their leader. A statement in grammatical and concise Arabic delivered to Reuters in Beirut identified them as the Organization of Struggle against World Imperialism, which confirms the “objectives and demands” of the Red Army Faction kidnappers of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer. The group demanded the release of 11 terrorists from the Socialist Patients’ Collective and Baader-Meinhof Group in West German jails, as well as the release of two PFLP terrorists held in Turkish jails since an attack on August 11, 1976. They demanded $15 million and 100,000 marks for each prisoner. The terrorists demanded to have the prisoners flown to Vietnam, Somalia, or South Yemen.
    The hijackers took off for Cyprus, landing in Larnaca, although the Cypriot government at first barred their arrival. In what came to be known as Operation Oscar X-Ray, Hans-Juergen Wischnewski, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s troubleshooter, carrying satchels with millions of marks, set off in a German jet trailing the hijacked plane in the hopes of beginning negotiations. Simultaneously, a West German commando unit began practicing assaults on a similar B-737 in the Cologne, West Germany, airport hangar. Two squads of 32 men each boarded a third jet and headed for Cyprus that night. Soon afterward, the German jet carrying the commandos arrived in Akrotiri, Cyprus, 50 miles from Larnaca, Cyprus. Perhaps fearing an