Events
- TWA Flight 847. One of the most dramatic hostage-takings in Lebanon occurred on June 14, 1985, when TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome was hijacked by "Organization for the Oppressed of the Earth." Passengers underwent a three-day, 8,300-mile (13,400 km) ordeal shuttling back and forth between Beirut and Algiers. Groups of passengers were freed over the course of event. One passenger, a U.S. Navy diver, Robert Dean Stethem, was beaten, shot and his body dumped on the runway. Another 39 passengers were held hostage in South Beirut for two weeks, as Lebanese army troops withdrew from the Beirut airport on June 16 leaving Hezbollah and Amal militias to control the area and hold the hostages. On June 30, they were driven to Syria and released. The liberation of the hostages was followed over the next several weeks by the release of 735 Lebanese Shiite militants by Israel. Although this was one of the key demands of the hijackers, Israel maintained the release was unconnected to the hijacking.
Read more about this topic: Lebanon Hostage Crisis
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Just as a mirror may be used to reflect images, so ancient events may be used to understand the present.”
—Chinese proverb.