The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks Read Free Page A

the conventions irrelevant to the episode at hand.

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The 1970s
    Many of the 50 Worst of the 1970s involved some form of hostage-taking, including classical kidnapping in which the perpetrators and their hostage(s) move from the original scene of the crime, barricade-and-hostage operations in which the terrorists and their hostage(s) stay put during the bargaining, and aerial, train, vehicular, and naval hijacking, a melding of the previous two types of hostage incidents.
    As had been the case in the 1960s, the terrorist spectaculars tended to take place in affluent countries or in capitals with a large media presence that guaranteed coverage of the exploits of the terrorists. News outlets quickly acceded to their demands for publicity of their manifestoes. The terrorists of the 1970s wanted a lot of people watching. They succeeded. The majority (88%) of international terrorist attacks during this period involved no deaths; only 16 percent involved injuries.
    The international community’s response to these new types of attacks was mixed. Nations directly affected by hostage-taking soon created elite military units designed to conduct daring rescue operations.
    The United Nations created a 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, including Diplomatic Agents (informally known as the Diplomat Convention). The United Nations went through several fits and starts at drafting a companion International Convention against the Taking of Hostages. Regional efforts included the 1971 Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish the Acts of Terrorism Taking the Form of Crimes against Persons and Related Extortion that Are of International Significance (the OAS Convention) and the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism. States sympathetic to various terrorist groups limited the effectiveness of these agreements by raising questions about the definitions of terrorism and hostage-taking, the rights of freedom fighters, extradition and the right of asylum, and sovereignty and territorial integrity.
    Foot-dragging on international legal conventions and regional accords was the first stage of a continuum of state support to terrorists, became increasingly worrisome in the 1970s. Allegations of Soviet Union and communist satellite support to Western European and Palestinian revolutionary terrorists were matched by charges against radical Middle Eastern regimes supporting any and all Palestinian terrorist groups. Many terrorist groups, including those who engaged in the sensational incidents that made the 50 Worst for the decade, benefited from and often owed their existence to the provision of funds, documentation, training, safe haven, arms, explosives, planning, insurance policies for terrorists’ families, and other forms of assistance by governments and wealthy nonstate backers. Various sanctions against these patrons led to little change; what change there was usually entailed the support becoming more clandestine and tougher to monitor.
    Most of the 50 Worst from this decade were attributable to the nexus between the West European leftists and the radical Palestinians. Many of the groups cross-trained, shared arms, and even joined each other in collaborative hit teams. The decade also saw a hint of what was to come from Islamist-based terrorist groups with attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tehran and Mecca.
March 31, 1970
Japan Airlines Flight 351 Hijacking to North Korea
    Overview: The Japanese United Red Army (URA) and its splinter groups in the late 1960s and 1970s were among the most feared terrorist groups in the world. Led by Fusako Shigenobu (who became one of the few prominent female terrorists of her generation, along with Petra Kraus, Ulrike Meinhof, and Leila Khaled), the group initially spread terror in its homeland before offering its services to revolutionaries throughout the world. Members of the newly formed Japanese Red Army (JRA)