T he war has been raging for more than a decade on a global battlefield. And it threatens to grow more intense. The principal victims are not soldiers but civilians: public officials and businessmen, as well as schoolrooms of children, planeloads of tourists and trains packed with commuters.
Last week, however, terrorism suffered a dramatic setback. The West German government refused to bow to the demands of a pistol-armed band of two men and two women who had skyjacked a Lufthansa jet and embarked on a hour odyssey of terror from Majorca to Mogadishu, Somalia. There, in a daring middle-of-the-night raid, West German commandos rescued 82 passengers and four crew members, killed three of the skyjackers and wounded the fourth see following story.
The dramatic rescue came less than a month after the Tokyo government had surrendered to the ransom demands of five Japanese Red Army terrorists who had skyjacked a JAL jet with passengers aboard. That was a superb job. But only a battle was won in a war that knows no boundaries. Schmidt was more than ready to fight. Three million WANTED posters flooded the country, carrying the photos of the ten women and six men suspected of being connected with the Schleyer killing.
These faces were splashed across newspaper front pages and broadcast by every TV station. Police vans, meanwhile, began cruising through cities, their loudspeakers blaring pleas for every citizen to aid in the search. Barricades sprouted across roads and police checked identity papers; traffic was snarled. Hours after ordering the man hunt, Schmidt appeared before a special session of the Bundestag.
Schleyer was the tenth target of West German terrorists to die in the past year. Another victim was Captain Jurgen Schumann, 37, pilot of the skyjacked Lufthansa jet. Had it not been for the skill of the rescuing commandos, many, if not all, of the terrified hostages might have suffered similar fates.
