Sabena Flight 571
aircraft hijacking
Sabena Flight 571 was a scheduled passenger flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv via Vienna, operated by the Belgian national airline, Sabena. On 8 May 1972, a Boeing 707 passenger aircraft operating that service, captained by British pilot Reginald Levy, DFC, was hijacked by four members of the Black September Organization, a Palestinian terrorist group.
Following their instructions, Captain Levy landed the plane at Lod Airport, later Ben Gurion International Airport. The hijackers demanded that Israel release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the hostages. The standoff was ended by an Israeli commando raid in which all of the hijackers were killed or captured.
Hijacking
The attack, planned by Ali Hassan Salameh, was carried out by a group of two men and two women who pretended to be two couples: the group's leader Ali Taha Abu Snina, plus Abed al-Aziz Atrash, Rima Tannous and Theresa Halsa. They were armed with two handguns, two hand grenades and two belts of explosives. Twenty minutes out of Vienna, the hijackers entered the cockpit. "As you can see," Captain Levy told the 90 passengers, "we have friends aboard." He concealed from the hijackers that his wife was a passenger on the plane, traveling with him to celebrate his birthday in Tel Aviv.
Soon after taking command, the hijackers separated the Jewish hostages from the others and sent them to the back of the aircraft.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15106049. Authority coordinates are 32.009, 34.877. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sabena Flight 571” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.