Hijack Victim Won’t Go to Malta Trial

A woman shot in the head by hijackers and dumped on a Malta airport runway last year has refused to return to the Mediterranean island to testify against the sole surviving suspect accused in the incident.

“I really want to get this guy and put him away,” Jackie Pflug, 31, told the Houston Chronicle from her new home in Minnetonka, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis. “They told me they’ll probably be able to get him without my testimony. I decided it would be too tough to go back and go through everything again. I couldn’t have handled it. I couldn’t have looked him in the eye.”

Pflug was aboard an Egyptian jet that was hijacked Nov. 23 on a flight from Athens to Cairo. The plane landed in Malta, where two passengers were killed and Pflug and another person were wounded.

Sixty people died in the bloody hijacking and subsequent rescue attempt by Egyptian commandos who stormed the plane.

Pflug and her husband, Scott, who both were teachers at American University in Cairo when the plane was hijacked, moved to Minnesota after her recovery. They are managing an apartment complex in Minnetonka.

Pflug was asked to return to Malta to testify against Omar Mohammed Ali Rezaq, the only surviving Palestinian accused in the hijacking.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of the hijacking,” Pflug said in an interview published today. “But now the angry and bitter feelings about what happened don’t control me. I’ve learned to control them.

“When the image of the guy with the gun comes up, I have a conversation with him in my mind. I tell him to look at me, that I’m OK and he can’t hurt me.”

The hijackers took Pflug from her seat on the airplane, tied her hands behind her back, forced her to kneel and shot her in the head before pushing her from the craft onto the runway.

She remained face down and semiconscious for three hours until her rescue by a crew delivering food to the terrorists.

After her rescue, Pflug underwent surgery to have the bullet removed from her skull.