Theresa Halsa, the last surviving hijacker of the Sabena plane in 1972, died in Jordan yesterday at the age of 65, following her cancer.
During her arrest, Sayeret Matkal fighter Binyamin Netanyahu was wounded by friendly fire. Halsa, a Christian, was born in Acre to a Jordanian father and mother from Nazareth.
Sabena Flight 571 was a scheduled passenger flight from Brussels to Lod via Vienna operated by the Belgian national airline, Sabena. On May, 8th 1972 a Boeing 707 passenger aircraft operating that service, captained by British pilot Reginald Levy, DFC, was hijacked by four members of the Black September Organization. Following their instructions, Captain Levy landed the plane at Lod Airport.
The attack, planned by Ali Hassan Salameh, was carried out by a group of two men and two women who pretended to be two couples: the group’s leader Ali Taha Abu Snina, plus Abed al-Aziz Atrash, Rima Tannous and Theresa Halsa.
They were armed with two handguns, two hand grenades and two belts of explosives. Twenty minutes out of Vienna, the hijackers entered the cockpit. "As you can see," Captain Levy told the 90 passengers, "we have friends aboard." He concealed from the hijackers that his wife was a passenger on the plane.