Personal Info
- Country of residence: Lebanon
Information
Suhaila Andrews is a Palestinian
woman, born on March 28, 1953, and lived in the Beirut suburb of Hadath. After
the massacre at Tal al-Zaatar, she tried to become a nun in a monastery, but
she gave up on that idea. She belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, then studied in Baghdad and received special military training.
On October 14, 1977, she
participated in the hijacking of the German Boeing 737 “Lands Hut” flight LH
181 heading from Mallorca Airport to Frankfurt, which was the last commando
operation organized by Wadih Haddad prior to his death. The executors' demands
stipulated the liberation of 11 of their colleagues from the Front, who were
detained in Germany, and a ransom of $15 million. The hijacked plane was
destined to land at Aden Airport, but the hijackers executed the pilot for
leaking information about them to official authorities, so the plane deviated
from its course, which led to its landing at Entebbe Airport in Somalia, where
Somali President Siad Barre allowed the plane to be stormed by a German squad
(GSG9) in coordination with England on October 18th. Suhaila's three comrades
were killed, namely the commander of the operation, Zuhair Okasha, who was
alive but was finished off, and Nabil Harbi and Nadia Daibes, who was killed in
the plane's bathroom, and Suhaila was wounded by ten bullets. And she appeared
in video reports raising the victory sign, despite her severe injury.
She was sentenced in Somalia on
April 25, 1978 to 20 years in prison, but she was released for health reasons.
She changed her name, married Dr. Ahmed Abu Matar, and had a daughter with him,
and she sought refuge in Norway in 1991. She was arrested in Oslo and deported
to Germany in November, where she was tried and sentenced to 12 years in
prison. She was imprisoned until 1997 in Germany, then she was allowed to
complete her sentence in a Norwegian prison for carrying citizenship.
Norwegian. She was released in 1999, after 6 years of imprisonment for health
reasons.
In her book “For the Red Army, he
was the regime, to me was the father,” former hostage Gabrielle von Lutzau
expressed her lack of understanding of Andrews' freedom and described her
participation in the operation as extremely brutal.
Suhaila apologized to some of the
hostages of the hijacked plane later, crying, in the semi-documentary film “The
Game of Death” by Heinrich Prelors of the West German broadcaster WDR.
On the day after the operation, the
Lebanese newspaper As-Safir headlined its front page with a picture of Suhaila
on a stretcher holding the victory sign, and above it was written: Fourth of
the Four!
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