Aden International Airport is a crossroads of history, where the turbulence of global conflict and human resilience intersect, leaving behind a legacy of both tragedy and hope.

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Fatimah Johnson (South24)

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Aden International Airport is no stranger to tragedy, including the murder of the innocent man pictured above.  Functioning in both a military and civilian capacity, since having been a British Royal Air Force station from 1917 to 1967, its ever strategic location in the world’s airways and in general (it is 6 km from the centre of Aden) has attracted many malevolent actors and unnecessary human suffering has ensued.  In the last ten years it has been the scene of the Battle of Aden Airport (2015), three members of the International Committee of the Red Cross amongst other victims lost their lives there (December 2020)¹, and twelve people were also killed close to Aden Airport (October 2021)².  What has been true more recently was also true in the 1970s when political crime plagued Aden Airport.  The crime however, was international in character and the political temperature as well as the political dynamics were vastly different.  The Cold War still separated huge swathes of humanity and threatened what George Orwell described as “an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity”³.  The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (aka South Yemen) of which Aden was the capital was firmly in the Communist or Soviet bloc led by the USSR opposed to the Western or Capitalist bloc led by the USA.  Hijackings of airplanes were occurring on average once every five days around the world⁴. The Venezuelan criminal, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez known as Carlos the Jackal, guilty of murder in the double figures in the name of “Palestinian resistance”⁵ and Communist revolution was living in Aden.  In 1972, South Yemen had been paid $1 million by West Germany to allow kidnappers  in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to land a hijacked plane at Aden Airport⁶. It was into this maelstrom that Captain Jürgen Schumann of the Landshut, a Boeing 737 – 230C on Lufthansa Flight 181 made a fateful forced landing at Aden Airport on 16 October 1977, 15:55 CET.  The plane was carrying elements from a unit of the PFLP created by Wadi’ Haddad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Special Operations Group (PFLP - SOG) who were partnered with West German terrorists, second generation members of the Red Army Faction (RAF).  A German Autumn had come to Aden.   

The RAF formed in the former Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) commonly known as West Germany, in 1970 and surviving members dissolved the organisation ignominiously by sending a fax to Reuters news agency on 20 April 1998, announcing an end to their “project”.  The RAF is also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang though they never used these names themselves.  In fact, whilst the English translation of their name in German (Rote Armee Fraktion) leads commonly in much of the literature about them to the use of the word faction as above, the group always called themselves Red Army Fraction as this is the correct translation into English and the group had an ideological reason related to the works of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for the deliberate use of the word fraction. 

A now deceased member of the RAF who was found guilty of murder in the 1980s in West Germany, Rolf Clemens Wagner, described the RAF in this way in 1998 from prison: “The project was explicitly political-military, the armed struggle was only one element of the praxis, to move away from burdensome ideology and feelings of powerlessness towards real attacks”⁷. Politically, the RAF were aligned with the Left and emerged from a serious disagreement on whether offensive violence against people and property (as opposed to defensive violence) should be used against the FRG state or not.  The extra-parliamentary Left in West Germany saw the FRG state as a fascist one.  A three year debate on the use of violence was stirred by the killing of a student in West Berlin by a police officer on 02 June 1967.  The student, Benno Ohnesorg, was attending a protest against a state visit by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when he was shot in the back of the head.  The disagreement on where to draw the boundaries of resistance against the FRG state not only broke the extra-parliamentary Left up, it also produced four people from its ranks who chose the path of offensive violence: 

Scorning 'intellectuals, cowards, and know-it-alls' who continued to debate whether the time for resistance had come, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler — the RAF's founders — announced it was time to bring the international struggle for liberation to the FRG.  Arrested in 1972, they continued to call on West Germans to counter the violence of police 'pigs' and fascist imperialism with violence on their own.⁸ 

On 13 October 1977 a statement was published by an organisation calling itself Struggle Against World Imperialism Organization, in which responsibility was taken for the hijacking of a commercial flight that had left Palma de Mallorca for Frankfurt carrying eighty-seven German tourists, Lufthansa Flight 181.  It was in fact four members of the PFLP - SOG who had assumed the fictitious name of Commando Martyr Halimeh and who were in criminal partnership with the RAF.  The statement reads: “This operation has as a goal the liberation of our comrades in the prisons of the imperialist-reactionary-zionist alliance”⁹. The RAF published its own statement on the same day confirming that: “The ultimatum of the “Martyr Halimeh” Commando’s Operation Kofr Kaddum and the ultimatum of the RAF’s “Siegfried Hausner” Commando are identical”¹⁰. Both statements assert that the PFLP - SOG and the RAF would use force and murder to achieve ideological and practical goals.  As well as claiming that West Germany had to be freed from occupation by the USA (and that the regimes in Israel, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Chile had to be destroyed), the hijacking took place to secure the release of eleven RAF prisoners in West Germany, the release of two Palestinian prisoners in Turkey, the acquisition of $15 million and transport of the hijackers to either Viet Nam, Somalia, Algeria, Libya, Ethiopia, Iraq or South Yemen.  

 

The hijacked plane, Landshut

According to the military historian Jonathan Walker, South Yemen was a host to not only the RAF and the PFLP - SOG but also other left wing rebel organisations like the Japanese Red Army¹¹, the French Action Directe, the Italian Red Brigades, the Spanish First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA)¹².The PFLP – SOG had been actively supported by South Yemen for at least seven years before the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, added to which Haddad already had ties with South Yemen’s National Liberation Front.  South Yemen provided the PFLP – SOG with assistance in numerous ways such as forged passports, training, weapons and transit.  The PFLP – SOG were allowed to establish training camps in South Yemen.  The group were also given sanction to use Aden as a hosting ground for potential allies of the PFLP – SOG where they could also be vetted and trained.  South Yemen was ideal for the PFLP – SOG as its alignment with the USSR shielded the country, preventing Israel from pursuing military strikes in retaliation against the group¹³. After a failed attempt to re-established contact it had once had with Fatah in 1970 in Jordan, the RAF travelled to Aden in 1975 having established an alliance with the PFLP – SOG.  The PFLP – SOG welcomed them in order to exploit the RAF’s notoriety (they were already at this point responsible for bombings, arson attacks, grand larceny, shootouts and prison breaks) and through them gain more attention for the PFLP – SOG’s mission objective, the dissolution of Israel.  In Aden the RAF learnt combat skills, how to sharpshoot, guerilla theory and put together an armed campaign to secure the release of first generation RAF members imprisoned in the West German prison system since 1972 whom they also hoped to move to South Yemen¹⁴. Terrifyingly, it was in Aden that the RAF planned Operation Big Money¹⁵. This was a botched kidnapping of a West German banker, Jürgen Ponto, that took place in July 1977 and resulted in his murder by gunshot, the group using the nom de guerre Roter Morgen (Red Morning) when claiming responsibility to Reuters¹⁶.

In hijacking Lufthansa Flight 181 the RAF and the PFLP – SOG made a broad assumption that would prove to be fatal for Captain Schumann, that the South Yemeni government would tolerate the completion of the 1977 operation in South Yemen itself.  The assumption is not altogether surprising when considering that South Yemen had willingly acted as a haven for the PFLP – SOG and the RAF.  After the hijacking was declared whilst the plane was flying over France en route to Frankfurt, the plane diverted to Rome on 13 October, then Larnaka in Cyprus, then to Bahrain, then to Dubai and next to Aden on 16 October.  The South Yemeni government had tried to block the plane from landing and manoeuvred tanks on the runway.  This forced an emergency landing onto the sand track. Captain Schumann then left the plane having convinced the PFLP – SOG to let him inspect it for damage.  On leaving the plane he spoke to a South Yemeni Air Force General, Sheikh Ahmed Mansur, insisting that the demands of the RAF and PFLP - SOG be agreed to.  It is reported that Mansur stated: “I can fulfill [sic] any other wish, but I cannot possibly fulfill [sic] the wish that the passengers get out and the hijackers negotiate from Yemeni soil”.  Captain Schumann is said to have replied: “I'm going back now. I'm sure they're going to kill me”.  When Captain Schumann returned to the Landshut he was shot in the head whilst on his knees by twenty-three year old Zohair Yousif Akache¹⁷.    

Six months earlier, in April of 1977, Zohair Yousif Akache had been in London, England.  He had already been in London studying for two and a half years at the Chelsea College of Aeronautical and Automobile Engineering for a diploma that he gained in December 1975.  In 1976 he hit a British policeman at a meeting he had been attending in London’s Hyde Park and as a consequence was jailed for six months and then deported.  At his arrest the police found him in possession of Palestine Liberation Organisation pictures and posters.  The New York Times and The Times newspaper ran stories on 11 April 1977¹⁸ and 19 April 1977¹⁹respectively that reported on a triple shooting of three Yemenis.  Abdullah al-Hajjri, his wife Fatimah and Abdallah al-Hammami.  Al- Hajjri had been Prime Minister of North Yemen from 1972 to 1974 and was also a judge.  Al-Hammami was a diplomat at the North Yemeni embassy in London.  The trio were killed with a 0.32 automatic pistol with a silencer at 11AM on 10 April 1977 whilst sitting in a car outside the Royal Lancaster Hotel and witnesses said they saw a man in his 20’s loitering in the hotel before the killings and that same man ran from the crime scene into an underground train station.  Akache is known to have booked a room at the Robert House Hotel that overlooked the entrance to the Royal Lancaster Hotel and did not return after the killings.  British police then raided twenty homes in London, Brighton and Hove on 18 April looking for Akache as they had evidence linking him to the murders and an arrest warrant had been issued in his name.  It was only in November 1977 that British police established that Akache had in fact left England from Heathrow Airport in the afternoon after the murders using a Kuwaiti passport and the name Ahmed Badir Al-Majid²⁰. 

Akache was eventually to die at Mogadishu International Airport, Somalia on 18 October 1977 along with two of the other hijackers, Wabil Harb and Hind Alameh.  The fourth, Souhaila Sami Andrawes Sayeh, was severely injured when the German police tactical unit, GSG 9, staged a rescue operation called Operation Magic Fire with the full support of the Somali Government of President Mohammed Siad Barre that saved all the passengers but eliminated the hijackers save Sayeh²¹. Captain Schumann’s body had been cruelly stored in a cupboard on the plane by the hijackers since his murder in Aden.  Upon arriving in Mogadishu, the hijackers left his body on the tarmac and authorities took him away.  None of the demands of either the PFLP – SOG or the RAF were ever met.  

The gruesome fallout from the hijacking increased the body count.  On the night of 18 October 1977, three members of the RAF, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe committed suicide in Stammheim Prison, Stuggart.  Wadi’ Haddad died less than a year after the hijacking, in March 1978, in former East Germany with allegations later surfacing that he had been poisoned.²² 

In 2008, a film called The Baader Meinhof Complex was released which won praise for its willingness to tackle the uncomfortable reality that a group who used violence against civilians without remorse had a significant number of sympathisers.  A poll by the Allensbach Institute indicated that in a hypothetical situation, 8.5 million Germans were open to offering members of the RAF shelter if asked rather than alerting the police.  It is tragic to contemplate that whilst the PFLP – SOG and the RAF opened Aden International Airport as a front for their actions they may not have ceased  committing crimes even if their demands were met.  In a paper entitled What Terrorists Really Want, Max Abrams cites a case study which claims that when the Viet Nam War ended in 1975, the RAF were annoyed as they had lost a suitable revolutionary subject and overnight came to support the Palestinian cause as a matter of convenience.  Abrams also details that the RAF admitted they joined the group not because they believed in its political agenda but to establish ties with other terrorists and to reduce feelings of alienation.  Most shockingly, when asked to describe what exactly the RAF hoped to achieve one of the founders replied: “That is not our concern”²³. Further indication that the RAF were never sincere is the conversion of one of the founding members, Horst Mahler, to neo-Nazism around the year 2000.²⁴   

More welcome news came to Aden in 2020 when the Saudi Development and Reconstruction Program for Yemen (SDRPY) announced it would restore Aden International Airport in order to fully modernise and expand it.  According to the SDRPY’s website the second of three phases of this project is now complete²⁵. Captain Schumann was laid to rest on 21 October 1977 in Hesse, West Germany.  The word autumn has been associated with death in Europe since the time that Shakespeare composed Sonnet 73 in the 1590s hence why the terror that the RAF inflicted in 1977 is known as German Autumn:

That time of year thou may'st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In 2021, Captain Schumann’s surviving wife issued this mature and dignified statement about him: “My husband was not a hero. As a flight captain, he had sole responsibility for his passengers. He acted within this responsibility”.26