Air France Flight 8969 (Operation Rock Climber) was an Air France Airbus A300 flight that was hijacked on 24 December 1994 at Houari Boumediene Airport, Algiers. The militants murdered three passengers and their intention was either to detonate the aircraft over the Eiffel Tower or the Tour Montparnasse in Paris. When the aircraft reached Marseille, the GIGN, a counterterrorism and hostage rescue unit of the French National Gendarmerie, stormed the plane and killed all four hijackers. The incident led to Air France halting their flights to Algeria until 2004, two years after the end of the Algerian Civil War.
Algeria was in a state of civil war at the time of the hijacking. Aircraft flying to Algeria faced the possibility of missile attacks. As a result, Air France's flights to Algeria had crews composed entirely of people who volunteered for the route.
The aircraft involved was a 14-year old Airbus A300B2-1C, registered as F-GBEC with MSN 104 and was equipped with two General Electric CF6-50C2R engines.
Bernard Dhellemme, aged 51, was the captain of the flight. Jean-Paul Borderie was the copilot, and Alain Bossuat was the flight engineer.
On 24 December 1994, at Houari Boumedienne Airport in Algiers, four armed men boarded Air France Flight 8969 which was due to depart for Orly Airport, Paris at 11:15 a.m. The men were dressed as Algerian presidential police; they wore blue uniforms with Air Algérie logos. Their presence originally did not cause any alarm. Two of the men began inspecting the passengers' passports while one went into the cockpit and the fourth stood guard. Claude Burgniard, a veteran flight attendant, recalled noticing that the "police" were armed and one of them had dynamite showing, which she considered to be unusual as the Algerian police were not normally armed when carrying out checks. The Algerian military felt suspicious on noticing that the Air France flight appeared to have an unauthorised delay, so they began surrounding the aircraft. Zahida Kakachi, a passenger, recalled seeing members of the Special Intervention Group (GIS), known as "ninjas", outside the aircraft. Kakachi recalled hearing one of the "police" say "Tāghūt (Arabic: طَاغُوت)", an Arabic word for "tyrant", upon seeing the GIS men gathering outside the A300; she then realised that the four men on board the plane were militants. The four hijackers then revealed that they were not police, but mujahideen seeking to establish an Islamic state in Algeria. They had hijacked the aircraft because the national airline Air France was a symbol of France, which they viewed as "infidel foreign invaders".
The leader, Abdul Abdullah Yahia, already a notorious murderer, and the other three members of the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé, or GIA) brandished firearms and explosives and announced their allegiance to the GIA, demanding co-operation from the 220 passengers and 12 flight crew. The hijackers had AK-47 automatic rifles, Uzi submachine guns, pistols, homemade hand grenades and two 10-stick dynamite packs. Later, at one point during the flight, the men placed one pack of dynamite in the cockpit and one pack under a seat in the middle of the aircraft, then linked them with detonator wire. They also took the uniforms of the pilots to confuse Algerian army snipers.
Burgniard recalled that the hijackers, in particular one called "Lotfi", disliked seeing a lack of adherence to their Islamic beliefs; according to Burgniard, the hijackers objected to men and women sitting together and sharing the same toilets and women having their heads uncovered. Once they had taken control of the aircraft, the hijackers forced the women to cover their heads, including the cabin crew members. Women who did not have veils used aircraft blankets as head coverings. An elderly Algerian man told the TF1 network that the hijackers "had a kind of art in their terror. Twenty minutes of relaxation and twenty minutes of torture. You never knew what was next."
The men stated over the aircraft's cockpit radio:
We are the Soldiers of Mercy. Allah has selected us as his soldiers. We are here to wage war in his name.
Abderrahmane Meziane Chérif, Algeria's minister for the interior, came to the airport control tower to begin negotiating with the hijackers, who were using the captain to speak for them. They demanded the release of two Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) political party leaders, Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj, who were under house arrest; the FIS was banned in Algeria in 1992. Chérif demanded that the hijackers begin releasing children and the elderly if they wanted to talk to the Algerian government. The media began arriving at the airport to cover the crisis.
At noon, the French minister for foreign affairs, Alain Juppé, organised a crisis team meeting, and Charles Pasqua, France's interior minister, met his aides. French prime minister Édouard Balladur was recalled from his Christmas holiday in Chamonix, France, and other government officials were also summoned from their vacations. Balladur recollected spending the entire afternoon on the telephone, trying to determine what was happening and feeling confused. According to Balladur, the Algerian authorities wanted to crack down on the militants and Balladur himself encountered difficulties discussing the events. At one point, the hijackers dropped the demand for the release of the FIS party leaders. Two hours into the hijacking, the men told the captain to depart for Paris so that they could hold a press conference there. The captain could not take off because the aircraft boarding stairs were still attached to the plane and the Algerian authorities were blocking the runway with parked vehicles. When the hijackers forced the captain to ask for the boarding stairs to be removed, the Algerian authorities refused, determined not to give in to any of the hijackers' demands. The GIA men announced that they would detonate the aircraft unless the Algerian authorities followed their orders.
During the passport check, the hijackers had noticed that one of the passengers on the flight was an Algerian police officer. In order to force the Algerian government to comply with their demands, the hijackers approached the police officer and told him to follow them. Kakachi remembered that the police officer, seated two rows behind her, was hesitant as he did not know what they were going to do. Several passengers recalled him pleading "Don't kill me, I have a wife and child!" The hijackers shot the police officer in the head at the top of the boarding stairs. The pilots and most of the passengers were not aware at first that the man had been killed. Captain Dhellemme recalled that his first contact with the passenger cabin during the hijacking was when a flight attendant, allowed into the cockpit, asked the pilots if they needed anything. According to Dhellemme, he asked for a glass of water from the attendant to ease the pilots' parched throats. At this point, the attendant whispered to Dhellemme that the hijackers had killed a passenger.
The Algerian authorities still refused to agree to the hijackers' demands. Burgniard recalled that he and the other occupants began to realise that "things were going wrong" when the hijackers came to collect another passenger. They selected 48-year-old Bui Giang To, a commercial attaché at the Embassy of Vietnam in Algeria. Burgniard described To as "the real foreigner on this plane". She remembered that To was not intimidated by the hijackers and she believed that this attitude upset the hijackers. The Vietnamese diplomat may have thought he was about to be released because he was a foreigner; instead he was shot dead on the boarding stairs. Dhellemme recalled that when the flight attendant next appeared with refreshments, she whispered to him that two passengers, not one, had been killed.
The French government wanted to bring French military personnel into Algeria to safely resolve the hijacking, but the Algerian government would not allow foreign military to land on Algerian soil to resolve an Algerian political crisis. Prime Minister Balladur said that he asked the Algerian government "extremely forcefully and urgently" to give permission for the aircraft to take off. He felt that the French government held responsibility for solving the problem as the aircraft belonged to a French airline and almost a third of the passengers were French.