Crime and the Punishment

Shortly before 9:30 a.m. one day last week, five well-dressed young Arabs walked into the consular section of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Paris.

There, in a now familiar ritual of terror, they pulled out automatic weapons and grenades and barricaded themselves inside the embassy with 15 employees whom they seized as hostages and threatened to kill if authorities would not accede to their demands.

The latest act of violence by Palestinian guerrillas took place on the anniversary of the Munich massacre, in which members of a fedayeen organization called Black September killed eleven Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games. The embassy episode was perpetrated by a splinter group called Al 'Iqab (the Punishment), which even the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut professed not to know about.

Despite the threatening tone of their words, the Punishment terrorists at first seemed intent on avoiding bloodshed, and in fact went out of their way to announce that they "did not want to be another Munich."

As French authorities rushed heavily armed special police to surround the two-story embassy in Paris' Passy district, the gunmen announced that they would release their hostages only if Jordan would free Abu Daud, a former high-ranking leader of Al-Fatah who is serving a life sentence in a Jordanian prison for allegedly plotting to overthrow King Hussein's regime. Jordan categorically refused.* The gunmen then temporarily shelved their insistence on Abu Daud's release and asked instead for a plane and crew to fly them to an Arab capital -- preferably Algiers, where the Summit Conference of Non-Aligned Countries was meeting.

Under pressure from Arab diplomats who mediated between the guerrillas and government officials in Paris, the French reluctantly agreed. The Arab diplomats, however, had trouble finding an airline willing to fly the terrorists, and the delay made the gunmen edgy. Trying to ease the tension, Kuwait Ambassador Feisal Saleh Al-Mutawa stood on the curb outside the embassy and through a megaphone pleaded with the terrorists to be reasonable. Explaining the difficulties in arranging for a getaway plane, he shouted: "We couldn't contact the Arab Foreign Ministers in Algiers during the night. They were sleeping." Retorted the gunmen: "We don't give a damn about their sleep! We're going to execute the hostages right away!" "Listen to me," begged the ambassador. "You're getting upset unnecessarily. The French government and we are in entire agreement. The only thing missing is the plane." "All these words are useless," the gunmen yelled back. "We are going to start snooting in a few seconds, and the French women will be the first to be executed."

Grim Warning. Luckily, they did not shoot. They set deadline after dead line for the arrival of the plane and their departure, and each time one deadline expired they set another. About 27 hours after they entered the embassy. Syrian Arab Airlines had provided a Caravelle jet and the French government had arranged for safe transit.

Packed into a minibus, the gunmen, their male hostages and Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed Naama El Naama (who had voluntarily substituted himself for the women hostages) sped to Le Bourget airport. There the terrorists released El Naama and three employees of the embassy, pushed four others, all Saudis, onto the plane and took off. After flying to Kuwait, where they exchanged the Caravelle for a Kuwait Airways Boeing 707 capable of flying 6,200 miles, they headed for Saudi Arabia. Circling over Riyadh, the Saudi capital, they warned that unless Jordan released Abu Daud they would "throw out the hostages one after the other."

Jordan remained firm in its refusal. When it became apparent that Jordan would not bend, the terrorists once again backed away from their ultimatum and returned to Kuwait.

At the airport in Kuwait another minidrama ensued. The terrorists demanded a car to drive them to Syria, but then they decided to hold hostage the driver, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization's office in Kuwait and the man who had been conducting negotiations. Totally exasperated by the terrorists' conduct, the Kuwait authorities thereupon surrounded the plane with 100 police and a dozen armored cars. The gunmen were finally cowed and meekly surrendered, giving up their four Saudi hostages unharmed and ending their bizarre, fruitless odyssey.

* As it did last March, when guerrillas who took over the Saudi Arabian embassy in the Sudan demanded freedom for Abu Daud. In retaliation, those terrorists killed one Belgian and two American diplomats who were being held as hostages.

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