SWATTING HIJACKERS AWAY: THE HIJACKING OF AIR FRANCE 8969 AND THE GIGN INTERVENTION

摘要

This is the story of one of the greatest and quickest interventions ever made by Special Forces. This is the story of a group of soldiers, members of an elite unit called GIGN, who saved more than 200 civilians during one of the scariest hijackings from the pre-9/11 era. If you work in the aviation industry or are passionate about aviation security, you will surely remember this incident from security courses as it still regarded as one of the top case studies illustrating intervention by Special Forces.Hijackings were originally considered to be financially or politically motivated acts of interference, where civilians were seized by lone hijackers, using the aircraft and their passengers as a means of ransom where demands could be made without any real intention to hurt those on board. But, in 1994, we had maybe the first real attempt to use a civilian airliner to target the national symbol of a country - the Eiffel Tower in Paris. This was seven years before 9/11, but the idea of using hijacked aircraft as weapons of mass destruction, targeting population centres and iconic buildings, was at the forefront of the minds of those following extremist ideologies.