Talk:1973 Rome airport attacks and hijacking

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A fact from 1973 Rome airport attacks and hijacking appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 20 November 2004. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that on December 17, 1973 Pan Am Flight 110 was attacked by six gunmen of the Abu Nidal Organization at Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Rome?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2004/November.

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Untitled

This article claims the gunmen were members of the Abu Nidal Organization, but that article says the organization didn't exist until 1974. Which is right? Gdr 14:37, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out this. Yes the gunmens were probably memebers of Fatah however investigations found that this attack was masteminded by Abu Nidal.

Who & how?

There seems to be a gap in the story in the third paragraph, between the penultimate sentence and the last sentence. In the last sentence it is stated that twenty eight people were killed and thirty three people were injured. But how did it come to this? Who killed and injured those people? What were the circumstances? It is not clear from the narrative what happened. Roaring_phoenix

rewrite

I did some serious editing of this page and read several news articles published at the time of the incident. There are a couple points that might be shaky, which are the numbers of dead and various types of hostages, and whether the hijacked plane flew to Athens or Beirut first.

I tabulated numbers of dead and hostages from several different articles and sources and chose the ones that offered the greatest consistency both across sources and in adding up to the total number of final dead and released hostages. All sources say 5 guerrillas and 12 hostages including crew came off the plane at the end. Almost all say that 29 died on the grenaded plane. The discrepancies are mostly small ones in the number of hostages forced onto the hijacked plane. There need to have been enough for two to be dumped in Athens (1 body, 1 injured) while 12 came off in Kuwait.

Also, a couple webpages I saw claimed that the plane went to Beirut first, was turned away and then went to Athens, but most indicated that the plane went to Athens first (which makes sense if the point was to liberate the "Black September" gunmen accused of the August 5 shooting in the Athens airport, and also makes more sense in terms of the flight path from Rome to Kuwait).

I could not find records in any reliable sources saying that the hijackers were eventually linked either to Fatah or to Abu Nidal so I removed that line. Plmoknijb 14:21, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Should the article be renamed?

This attack consists of three parts: The terminal shooting, the invasion of the Pan Am flight, and the Lufthansa hijacking. Therefore, I think the current title is not well chosen, as it reflects only one part. Wouldn't something like "Fiumicino Airport Massacre" (in accordance with the article of the Italian Wikipedia) or "Rome airport attacks" (like the Finnish Wikipedia—which I would prefer) be more suitable?--FoxyOrange (talk) 09:34, 18 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agree the title should describe the whole "event", not sure I like Massacre as it sounds like hundreds of deaths, tragic as it was "Rome airport attacks" or similar should be OK. MilborneOne (talk) 17:28, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This seems quite right to me. I have therefore moved the article to "1973 Rome airport attacks" (if memory serves, there were others that took place in the 1970s–1980s). I rewrote the introductory section slightly to reflect the move. I believe the article should retain the flight incident infobox and have left it in place. plmoknijb (talk) 09:29, 2 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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