Tuesday 29 April
Award-winning journalist Peter Taylor moves forward to Christmas Eve 1994 as his series profiling four landmark terrorist attacks from the past 30 years continues.
As an Air France plane prepares to leave Algiers airport, four uniformed men enter the plane to check passports. But they are not Algerian officials; they are members of the GIA, a notoriously ruthless Islamist extremist group who have been slaughtering politicians, policemen and civilians in a brutal civil war that has engulfed Algeria.
The hijackers demand to be allowed to leave immediately for Paris. The Algerian authorities play for time. The French government’s request for permission to intervene is denied. Two days later, and only after the execution of three passengers, the Algerian authorities allow the flight to take off.
Forced to stop to refuel in Marseille, the terrorists demand 27 tonnes of fuel to fly on to Paris. By now, the French authorities have intelligence that the hijackers have no intention of landing in the French capital. Instead, in a terrifying prototype of 9/11, they are planning to use the plane as a missile and crash it into the heart of Paris.
The crisis is resolved when an elite unit of French commandos raids the plane. All the terrorists are killed and, miraculously, all of the remaining hostages survive.
A new combustible form of terror had arrived: the power struggle within one country combined with a new strain of Islamist extremism. The result is a commitment to a spectacular war on the non-believer, a war that makes no distinction between guilty and innocent, combatant and civilian.
This terror was being exported to the territory of the enemy, from Algeria to France. But the sacred war, or jihad, was about to intensify. Harnessed by al-Qaeda, it was about to spread in all directions across the globe.
9.00-10.00pm BBC TWO
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