Ordeal on Jet: Cries for Help, Moments of Terror : American Tells of Surviving ‘Execution’

For Patrick Scott Baker, a light-hearted, 28-year-old American seeing the world on a bargain ticket to Bangkok via Athens and Cairo, the flight began with a cordial welcome by one of the hijackers and ended with Baker surviving, almost incredibly, a point-blank “execution” by gunfire.

To Mohammed Wakil, a 33-year-old Egyptian on the way home to Cairo from the Libyan hotel school where he teaches cooking, the hijacking began with a lively and healthy fear, paled to what he recalls as deathly indifference and ended with two bullet wounds inflicted by his own Egyptian army rescuers, who mistook him for one of the sky pirates.

The tales of these and other hospitalized survivors, and of officials and post-hijacking investigators, began Monday to clarify some of the confusion that still surrounds the seizure and costly liberation of EgyptAir Flight 648, a Boeing 737 that now sits as a burned-out hulk at Luqa International Airport here.

In all, 60 of the 97 people on board perished in the hijacking and its aftermath. Twenty-six remain in the crisply efficient St. Luke’s Hospital in Valletta, suffering wounds, injuries and fire-caused lung damage ranging from minor to life-threatening.

The ordeal was terrifying for all the survivors and victims. But it held a particularly sharp edge for three of the St. Luke’s patients--Baker, who is from White Salmon, Wash.; Jackie Nink Pflug, 30, a Texas woman working in Cairo, and a 24-year-old Israeli woman, Tamar Artzi--who were among the five passengers the hijackers selected and shot. Of the two others, both young women, an American was killed outright, and an Israeli, although still breathing, has been declared brain-dead from a hijacker’s bullet.

The murders began not long after the seized airliner landed in Malta on Saturday night, and the hijackers released two slightly wounded stewardesses and nine Egyptian and Philippine women, Baker said.

As he describes it:

“Delegating an Egyptian crew member to do the work for him, the (chief) hijacker had a steward ask for ‘one Israeli girl’ to come forward. He took her outside to the platform (of a boarding stairway drawn up to the left front door). I heard her cry ‘Help!’ in English, and a second later, I heard a shot.

“Five minutes later, they asked for another Israeli girl. She was reluctant to come forward, but one of the crew finally identified her by her passport. He had to tell them. I don’t know whether he was a steward or the flight engineer. He had no choice.

“They took her forward, where she was forced to lie on the floor for five minutes. Finally she was taken outside, and there were two shots.

“Then they went through the passports again and picked out the American passports and asked the Americans to come forward--three Americans. I stepped forward, followed by two girls--two women.

“My hands were bound with a necktie behind my back by someone the terrorists delegated to bind them. He was reluctant and whispered to me, ‘I’m sorry.’ He also bound the hands of the girls, and they sat us in the front seats on the starboard side.

” . . . Five minutes later, he opened the front door again, and he signaled to the guy who bound my hands to take me out.

“I went out and stood on the edge of the platform. I looked over and contemplated jumping. But it was too late.

“I heard an explosion and felt it on my head,” he went on. “I was really confused for a split second. Why was I still standing there? I went head first down the stairs and lay there playing dead. I hope I made a good show of it. I thought they might shoot me again.”

Truck Cab Breaks Fall

Baker said he lay still with his eyes closed and felt two sets of hands lift him to the top of the platform, then drop him over the side--but in plunging to the tarmac, his fall was broken by the truck cab of the mobile boarding platform.

“He was extremely lucky,” said Dr. Carmel Sciberras, one of the physicians treating the survivors. “There was enough blood from the light, grazing wound on the side of his head to help him play possum. But aside from that, he wasn’t hurt. He didn’t even require sutures for the wound.”

Pflug, one of the American women who followed him, was not so lucky, although she also survived the murderers’ bullets.

“She was hit in the head, but the bullet did not penetrate deeply and, along with bone fragments, affected a relatively unimportant part of the brain,” said Dr. Angelo Psaila, another member of the medical team. “She has such a good prognosis that I expect her release from hospital in 10 days.”

Scarlett M. Rogenkamp, 38, the third of the Americans shot by the leader of the hijackers, apparently died instantly, Psaila said.

Artzi, the surviving Israeli woman, suffered relatively minor wounds, one in the pelvis and one in the cheek--the latter a killing wound had it been less than an inch closer to her skull, Psaila said.

Mittzan Mendelsohn, the other Israeli woman, was struck full in the head and has been diagnosed as brain-dead, he said.

Saw Only 3 Hijackers

While there were differences in the accounts of the survivors, the general outline of events on the plane during the ordeal of terror was accepted by all. They said that despite Maltese government assertions to the contrary, they saw only three hijackers when the aircraft was hijacked--one of whom was killed during the takeover--and not the five mentioned by Maltese government spokesman Paul Mifsud.

“I only ever saw three,” said Australian survivor Tony Lyons, who lives near Cambridge, England. And one of them died early in the hijacking, Lyons added, while collecting the passengers’ passports and frisking them for weapons.

“The chap doing the frisking was extremely rough,” he said, echoing numerous remarks concerning the behavior of the terrorist who policed the center of the passenger cabin early in the flight.

“He came across the Egyptian security guard, who drew a gun and shot him,” Lyons said, “and that opened a full-scale battle. Bullets were flying everywhere, and we were ducking down behind the seats.”

According to Mohammed Wakil, the high-altitude gunfight, in which the two surviving hijackers shot and killed the security guard, was brief, but it depressurized the plane, forcing the pilot to plunge about 20,000 feet in search of air.

“Everyone put his head down,” Baker said. “There was no panic; no one freaked out. Things remained kind of stable until we hit the ground here in Malta. None of us knew where we were. I assumed it was Beirut.”

Lyons said: “When we finally put down in Malta, they had turned out the airport landing lights. Nobody wants you when you are hijacked.”

Tension Got Worse

All those interviewed said tension built steadily once the plane was on the ground, particularly when the terrorists began shooting passengers in cold blood. The executioner was the hijackers’ leader, who had remained in the front of the airplane, where he could cover the cockpit with his weapon.

Wakil said that at the beginning of the flight, when the terrorists seized control only 10 minutes after takeoff from Athens, he felt fear--but also a lively interest in the activity around him. Later in the flight, however, Wakil said, he was strangely depressed, as if life no longer mattered to him.

For Baker, one of the oddest moments of the flight came early on, when the rough-handed hijacker in the center aisle collected his passport. As Baker handed the document over, the terrorist smiled and said in English: “Welcome.”

As Baker recalled the moment, he added his own comment: “Welcome to my nightmare.”

The cataclysmic end to the affair was the storming of the plane by Egyptian troops, and because of the heavy loss of life, the commando assault is likely to be a matter of debate for years.

While Lyons, Baker and Wakil, whose lives were at stake, agreed that the costly operation appeared to be necessary because the hijackers seemed prepared to keep killing passengers, there was criticism of the Egyptian commandos from other quarters. A Greek diplomat here, worried about his own nationals on the plane, said, “Whether it was necessary or not, it was clumsy and costly.”

Force Was Necessary

But Wakil said that although “it was hell inside the plane,” he believes that all hijackings should be dealt with by force.

“If we give the terrorists what they want, it will never stop, this terrorism,” the Egyptian said. “But if we kill them--even if some of us die--they will know they will be killed in the end.”

To Lyons, the deadly assault on the plane spelled his salvation from execution.

“I was next on the list in the order they had the passports, and I was resigned to the fact by then that I was going to be shot,” he said. “I felt that at any moment they were going to open the door again, and I was going to be next out.”

Instead, he said, “all of a sudden there were the grenades, a lot of firing, the fire in the fuselage, thick acrid smoke which choked you when you tried to breathe.

Couldn’t Tell the Players

“I waited until the firing ceased within the aircraft and stumbled forward, falling over people,” Lyons said. “We fell out the door and down the stairs onto the tarmac, where there was a lot of firing going on, many people being shot indiscriminately. This was basically due to the fact that the Egyptian commandos didn’t know who was a terrorist and who wasn’t, and perhaps a bit of (misinformation) they had on how many terrorists there were.”

Describing the final chapter of the hijacking, Wakil said he knew that the plane was about to be stormed when he spotted an Egyptian soldier on the right wing, near his escape-hatch seat. He dropped to the floor and tucked his head under a seat for protection.

“Then the emergency hatch fell on my body, and the Egyptian soldiers walked across it,” he said. “I heard a grenade explode. One of the soldiers threw a gas bomb. I jumped up and leaped out when the Egyptian soldiers got in the plane.

“But when I got on the wing and jumped from the wing to the ground, the soldiers shot me in the hand and the leg, because they thought I was a terrorist,” Wakil said. “I yelled to them in Cairo Arabic that I am a passenger and please don’t shoot anyone.”