The World - News from July 5, 1988
Mohammed Ali Hamadi goes on trial in Frankfurt, West Germany, today on charges of murder and air piracy in the hijacking of a TWA jetliner, and some of the 39 Americans he is charged with holding hostage for 17 days are expected to testify. “I’m ready to go,” said one of the former hostages, Kurt L. Carlson, a Chicago-area native who said he was beaten by the hijackers for two consecutive hours. “All the beating and the terror--our lives were threatened every minute on that plane.” TWA flight 847 was hijacked on June 14, 1985, while en route from Athens to Rome and was diverted to Beirut. A passenger, Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem, 23, of Waldorf, Md., was fatally shot during the hijacking.
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