Brief and Bloody

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 708 was 13 minutes out of Addis Ababa last week, en route to Asmara, Athens, Rome and Paris, when a grim, familiar sequence began. Five men and two women stood up in various sections of the Boeing 720-B jet's passenger section, pulled out guns and began shouting orders in Amharic. Their skyjacking attempt turned out to be brief, bloody and singularly unsuccessful. Ethiopian security men, who have been aboard all the airline's international flights with orders to shoot to kill, also jumped up and commenced firing. Six of the skyjackers were killed outright and the seventh died later in a hospital of wounds sustained in the shooting.

One of the group had been holding a hand grenade from which he had pulled the pin. As he fell, the grenade slipped from his hand. Passenger Roderick A. Hilsinger, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, snatched the grenade and lobbed it toward an unoccupied part of the cabin. The grenade exploded with a muffled roar, wounding Hilsinger and six others. The blast also damaged an inboard engine as well as the plane's rudder controls; as acrid smoke filled the cabin, the jet went into a dangerous dive.

The pilot finally regained control of his plane and flew it back to Addis Ababa's Haile Selassie I airport. There the skyjackers were linked with the Eritrean Liberation Front, which has long been fighting to free Ethiopia's northernmost province. In 1970 two other Eritrean rebels attempted a similar skyjack. They were subdued by security men who neatly tucked towels on the seats behind the culprits and then slit their throats.

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