The hijacking
On 13 October 1977, four hijackers seized the Lufthansa Boeing 737 “Landshut” on its way from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt am Main. On board were 86 passengers and five crew. According to the Bundestag’s research service, the hijackers belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and acted in coordination with the Red Army Faction (RAF), which five weeks earlier had kidnapped the employers’ president Hanns Martin Schleyer. The commando was led by Zohair Youssif Akache.
The hijackers demanded the release of eleven RAF prisoners and two Palestinians held in Istanbul, plus 15 million US dollars. It was the climax of what Germans call the “German Autumn”.
Five days, six airports
The aircraft flew to Rome, Larnaca, Bahrain and Dubai, where it stood on the tarmac for more than 54 hours, and then to Aden. There, on 16 October 1977, the hijackers shot the captain, Jürgen Schumann. Co-pilot Jürgen Vietor flew the aircraft on to Mogadishu, Somalia, where it arrived on 17 October.
Minister of State Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski obtained the Somali government’s permission for a rescue operation.
Seven minutes on the runway
The assault — code-named “Feuerzauber” (“Fire Magic”) — came shortly after midnight German time on 18 October 1977, just after 2 a.m. local time. It was led by GSG 9 commander Ulrich Wegener. Two British SAS soldiers were attached to the operation and brought newly developed stun grenades.
The operation took about seven minutes. All hostages were freed. Three of the four hijackers were killed; the fourth, Souhaila Andrawes, was seriously wounded. One GSG 9 officer and one flight attendant were injured. Andrawes was later sentenced in Hamburg, on 19 November 1996, to 12 years in prison, and was transferred to Norway to serve the rest of her sentence.
That same night, the RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison; the official finding was suicide. Schleyer was murdered by his captors; his body was found on 19 October 1977 in Mulhouse.
GSG 9 had been founded only five years earlier, in September 1972, after the failed police operation at the Munich Olympics. Mogadishu made it famous.
The aircraft today
The “Landshut” flew for Lufthansa until 1985 and was taken out of service in 2008. In 2017 it was brought back from Brazil to Friedrichshafen. The Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) is preserving it — conserving rather than restoring it to its 1977 state — as the learning site “Lernort Landshut”, scheduled to open around the 50th anniversary of the hijacking.
How GSG 9 selects officers
GSG 9 does not recruit straight from civilian life. Applicants must first complete police training in the middle or upper service. They then face the Eignungsauswahlverfahren (EAV), a selection procedure of physical and psychological tests that normally lasts five days, followed by ten months of basic and specialist training. According to the last published Bundespolizei rules, candidates must not have turned 34 by the start of training.
The sport test minimums, as last published by the Bundespolizei, were: 10 bench-press repetitions at 75% of body weight, 10 strict pull-ups, at least 3,000 m in the 12-minute Cooper test, 100 m in 13.4 seconds or less and a standing long jump of at least 2.40 m. The Bundespolizei currently describes the procedure as under revision, so treat these as a guide rather than a guarantee.