Pass
Accurate
Nerves Of Steel
Strong Arm
Leila Khaled (Arabic: ليلى خالد‎ laylĂ ẖālid; born April 9, 1944) is a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), part of the secular, leftwing Palestinian rejectionist front. She is currently a member of the Palestinian National Council.
Khaled came to public attention for her role in a 1969 hijacking and one of four simultaneous hijackings the following year as part of the Black September timeline.
Khaled was born in 1944 in Haifa, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine. When the Arabs rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, fighting broke out between the Arabs and Jews, and in 1948 Khaled's family moved to Lebanon, leaving behind her father, a member of the fedayeen.
At the age of 15, Khaled became one of the first to join the radical pan-Arab Arab Nationalist Movement, originally started in the late 1940s by George Habash, then a medical student at the American University of Beirut. The Palestinian branch of this movement became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after the 1967 Six-Day War.
Khaled also spent some time as a teacher in Kuwait, and in her autobiography recounted crying the day she heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
On August 29, 1969 Khaled was part of a team that hijacked TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Athens, diverting the Boeing 707 to Damascus, where it landed after flying over Haifa in order for Khaled to see her birthplace, which she was not allowed to visit. No one was injured, although the aircraft was blown up. According to some media sources, [attribution needed] the PFLP leadership had thought that Yitzak Rabin, the Israeli ambassador to the United States would be on board. This was however denied, by Leila Khaled herself, amongst others. After this hijacking, Khaled underwent the first of several plastic surgeries intended to conceal her identity.
On September 6, 1970, Khaled and Patrick Arguello, a Nicaraguan, attempted the hijack of El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York as part of the Dawson's Field hijackings; a series of almost simultaneous hijackings carried out by the PFLP. The attack was foiled when Israeli skymarshals killed Arguello before eventually overpowering Khaled. Although she was carrying two hand grenades at the time, Khaled said she had received very strict instructions not to threaten passengers on the civilian flight.[4] (Patrick Arguello, the co-hijacker, shot a member of the flight crew, and some sources suggest both that he threw a grenade that did not detonate, and that Khaled attempted to reach her own grenades but was subdued by sky marshals before she could use them).
The pilot diverted the aircraft to Heathrow airport in London, where Khaled was delivered to Ealing police station. On October 1, the British government released her as part of a prisoner exchange. The next year, the PFLP abandoned the tactic of hijacking, although its descendant movements would continue to hijack airplanes, most famously resulting in the Entebbe raid of 1976.