Strangely Consistent

Theory, practice, and languages, braided together

by Carl Mäsak
no notes

November 24 2010 — the guilty hiding among the innocent

25 years ago yesterday, EgyptAir Flight 648, hijacked two days prior by the terrorist Abu Nidal Organization and forced to land on Malta, was raided by an Egyptian special forces counter-terrorism team. The raid led to dozens of deaths, making the hijacking of Flight 648 one of the deadliest such incidents in history.

The storming of the aircraft killed 56 (out of the remaining 88) passengers, two crew members, and one terrorist. Only one terrorist still remained undetected by the Maltese Government, Omar Mohammed Ali Rezaq, who in fact survived. Rezaq the terrorist leader, who was injured during the storming of the aircraft, got rid of his hood and ammunition and pretended to be an injured passenger. The Egyptian commandos tracked Rezaq to St. Luke's General Hospital and holding the doctors and medical staff at gun point, they entered the casualty ward looking for him. It was not until some of the other passengers in the hospital recognised him that he was eventually arrested.

I think that's the most cowardly things I've ever heard a terrorist leader do, in reality or fiction.

Rezaq was put on trial in Malta, yet with no anti-terror legislation, he was tried on other charges. There was widespread fear that terrorists would hijack a Maltese plane or carry out a terror attack in Malta as an act of retribution. Rezaq was given a 25-year sentence of which he only served eight. His release caused a diplomatic incident between Malta and the U.S. because Maltese law strictly prohibited trying a person twice, in any jurisdiction, on charges connected to the same series of events (having wider limitations compared to classic double jeopardy). Following his immediate expulsion on release, he was nevertheless captured on arrival in Nigeria. After three months he was handed over to the U.S., brought before a U.S. court and sentenced to life imprisonment on October 7, 1996 with a no-parole recommendation.

I'm having trouble deciding whether I think his second sentence was fair or unfair. I'm not too used to thinking about different national law systems interacting.

❦

This blog post is late. I fell asleep early last night, and slept soundly for several hours. To the extent that I have any obligations to blog each day, sorry about that.

That was my first reason to feel slightly incompetent. Here's the second reason: you remember yesterday when I cleared the cache and the problem just went away, right? And I concluded that whatever faulty .trans call (or whatever) might have caused this, it must be gone now. But a new problem appeared: now the markdown was no longer turned into HTML.

I wrote "And yes, I did revert the change that turned off the Text::Markup::Wiki::MediaWiki code path." Problem is, it seems I reverted that change after running November once. Which (duh) re-cached the page with the HTML generation turned off.

After realizing that, I cleared the cache again. Now we're back to this.

Are y u eager t  see Per  6  eing re eased, s  y u  an write
pr grams in it with ut w rrying if the  anguage is "d ne" yet?

So this day and yesterday have essentially taken me a full circle, not giving much insight besides the realization that I'm sloppy and forgetful.

Ah well. New chance to actually fix stuff tomorrow. Er, I mean today.