Hostages : dramatic accounts of real-life events

249 Pages·2011·2.57 MB·English

by  Kerr

Hostages
Dramatic Accounts of Real-Life Events
Gordon Kerr and Phil Clarke
Published by Canary Press eBook Limited at Smashwords
Copyright 2013 Canary Press eBooks Limited
© 2013 Canary Press eBooks
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ISBN: 9781907795800
Cover & internal design: Anthony Prudente
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Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: POLITICAL PAWNS
The Dawson’s Field Hijackings
The October Crisis of 1970
The Munich Olympic Hostage Crisis
Patty Hearst
Tiede Herrema
The Dutch Train Hostage Crisis of 1975
The Hijacking of Air France 139
Aldo Moro
The Iranian Embassy Siege
The Iranian Hostage Crisis 1979-1981
William Buckley
Terry Anderson
Terry Waite
Air France Flight 8969
United Airlines Flight 93
Ingrid Betancourt
The Nord-Ost Theatre Siege
The Beslan Hostage Crisis
Margaret Hassan
Kenneth Bigley
Alan Johnston
PART TWO: A QUESTION OF INSANITY
Leon Bearden: Continental Flight 54
Colleen Stan
Gary Heidnik
The Incarceration of Elisabeth Fritzl
The Alta View Hospital Incident
Stephanie Slater
David Koresh and the Siege at Waco
Marc Dutroux
Natascha Kampusch
Joseph Palczynski
The Abduction of Elizabeth Smart
The Abduction of Katelyn Kampf
The West Nickel Mines Amish School Shooting
The Johnson Space Center Shooting
Lisa Nowak
PART THREE: FOR FINANCIAL GAIN
Charles Ross
Edward Cudahy Junior
The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping
Frank Sinatra Junior
Barbara Mackle
The D. B. Cooper Hijacking
The Chowchilla Bus Hijacking
The Miracle of Cokeville
Gladbeck Hostage Crisis
Holly Sheldon – Express Kidnapping
Shannon Matthews
Introduction
Hostage-taking has become very fashionable in recent years although, of course,
it has always been around, a handy tactic to be used by anyone trying to gain
advantage or leverage of some kind. From time immemorial, hostages have been
taken whether in sieges, when entire cities could be held hostage for months or
even years until everyone starved to death or the besieging army got bored, or to
ensure good behaviour. Vlad the Impaler was taken hostage as a child by the
Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century in order to ensure the good behaviour
towards the Turks of his country, the principality of Wallachia. Threatened with
invasion, Vlad’s father, also called Vlad, promised to become a vassal – servant
– of the Sultan and both his younger sons were handed over to the Turks to
ensure that the promise was kept. Vlad never forgot or forgave his treatment at
the hands of the Turks and tens of thousands of them died horrendously as a
result.
Recent hostage-taking seems mainly to have been a preoccupation of minority
groups attempting to gain political leverage of some kind. Islamists, Chechens
and others have become past masters of the art of kidnapping and of using the
hostage over a period of time to gain global media coverage for their cause or to
try to persuade governments to release their comrades. Results are often
negligible and a disturbing number of deaths have recently ensued as
governments steadfastly refuse to bend to the will of the abductors, the thinking
being, of course, that if they give in to one, it will serve only as encouragement
for the others, leading to a spate of kidnappings.
There have been some dramatic losses of life, of course, in recent hostage
situations. The Beslan Hostage Crisis in which a group of armed terrorists took
1,100 hostages in a school in the town of Beslan in the Russian republic of North
Ossetia, ended horrifically in the deaths of at least 334 people, 186 of them
children. The Moscow Theatre hostage crisis, known also as the Nord-Ost Siege,
was staged by Chechen terrorists. On that occasion 850 hostages were taken and
at least 129 of them died horrifically when a toxic substance was pumped into
the auditorium.
Political hostage-taking can be very dangerous not just for hostages, however. In
these situations, the actions of governments are carefully scrutinised and they
often become a measure of how effective a government or a ruler is. The 1979
storming of the American Embassy in Teheran by militant students loyal to the
Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini, in which sixty-five Americans were taken
hostage, sparked an international crisis lasting more than a year that tested the
United States President Jimmy Carter to the limit. As the world watched, Carter
failed in a disastrous mission to free the hostages; helicopters were downed by
mechanical failure and Carter was humiliated. His humiliation was complete
when the hostages were freed just hours after Ronald Reagan, who had beaten
him in the November 1980 presidential election, took the Presidential Oath of
Office on 20 January 1981.
The Middle East is where kidnapping has become a daily threat for any
westerner or non-Muslim living or working there. In war-torn Lebanon extremist
Shiite groups began kidnapping people in 1982 to advance their cause and obtain
the release of Islamic activists from Israeli prisons. During this time a number of
British hostages were taken and held for extraordinarily long times. Terry Waite,
an envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, seeking the release of other hostages
in Lebanon, including the British journalist, John McCarthy, was held for almost
five years, the first four of which were spent entirely in solitary confinement, an
exacting ordeal. American journalist, Terry Anderson, was a captive of the Shiite
Hezbollah organisation for an extraordinary six years and nine months.
Those early hostages were often released. In recent and more extreme times,
however, hostages taken in Iraq and Afghanistan face the very real danger of
horrific death at the hands of Islamic extremists often with links to Osama bin
Laden’s al-Qaeda. Engineer Ken Bigley and much-loved care humanitarian
relief worker Margaret, are just two of the victims of the new, brutal form of
hostage-taking, their deaths being broadcast on the internet. Others, such as BBC
journalist, Alan Johnston, kidnapped in Gaza and freed after four months and a
global media campaign, have been more fortunate.
Hostage-taking or abduction comes in many different forms. There are countless
instances of criminal abduction. One of the most recent examples has also
become probably one of the most notorious cases in criminal history of holding a
person against their will. The world was stunned by the news that the Austrian
Josef Fritzl had been holding his daughter prisoner for twenty-four years in the
basement of the house he shared with his wife and other children. She had seven
children by him and was raped by him thousands of times. Another Austrian girl,
Natascha Kampusch was held for more than eight years by her abductor,
Wolfgang Priklopil until her escape in August 2006.
Horrific though those stories are, the girls kept prisoner by the Belgian
paedophile, Marc Dutroux, suffered an even worse fate. Kept in the basements
of several of the houses he owned, the girls were subject to torture and sexual
abuse. Four of them died, two of them starving to death in their dungeon, when
the man he had delegated to feed them failed to do so.
One can question the sanity of men such as Dutroux, Fritzl, Priklopil or self-
styled messiah, David Koresh, who led his religious cult, the Branch Davidians,
in the siege that took place at Waco in Texas that ended in the deaths of many of
his followers. Some hostage situations have been instigated by people who have
either been clearly psychotic or undergoing a psychological crisis themselves.
The case of Gary M. Heidnik who kidnapped, tortured and raped six women in
Philadelphia in 1986 and 1987, shows clear evidence of psychotic behaviour.
Heidnik aimed to capture ten women and have children with them, in a kind of
perverse search for love that only provided horror and terror for his victims. He
even went as far as feeding the flesh of one of his victims to the others, after
grinding it up in a food processor.
As long as people want something – money, power, the release of comrades, the
prevention of a family member doing something or the analysis of the human
body as part of an intergalactic survey – the possibility of someone being held
against their will in order to achieve that aim will always be there. In the twenty-
first century, the practice of hostage-taking and abduction shows no signs of
abating.