Story by Conflicts:
On December 24, 1994, four Islamists from the GIA took control of the Air France plane parked at Algiers airport.
An Airbus A300 with 220 passengers (including 100 Algerians and 72 French) and 12 crew members is immobilized by the Islamists. The hostage-taking took place thanks to the complicity of a border police inspector, who allowed the Islamists to seize an Air France vehicle in order to approach the plane and to enter it.
At 11:05 a.m., they entered the plane, introducing themselves to the crew members as police officers, then checked the passengers' passports. Then the four men reveal their intentions and take control of the plane. They ask the plane to take off towards Paris. Their objective is to transform the plane into a bomb by crashing into the Eiffel Tower or the Montparnasse Tower.
Édouard Balladur, then Prime Minister, must first negotiate with the Algerian government which, refusing to let the plane leave, threatens the lives of the hostages. Algiers plans to make a rapid assault, which would result in carnage.
At 1:30 p.m., a first hostage was shot dead. In total, four hostages were killed in Algiers, including the cook from the French embassy.
Édouard Balladur allows women and children to be released. On December 25 at 1 p.m., 65 passengers were released. But Algiers continues to let the plane leave as well as allowing the intervention of the French GIGN. Finally, Edouard Balladur threatens the Algerian government to cut aid from France. Alger goes to bed and agrees to let the plane go.
Due to lack of fuel, it landed at Marignane airport. The Islamists want to refuel to get to Paris, but the French government is determined not to let the plane leave.
Flight AF 8969 landed in Marignane on December 26 at 3:12 a.m. Tired by the hostage-taking, the members of the commando maintain radio silence and take the opportunity to sleep.
The GIGN suggests to the commando that they organize a press conference at the front of the aircraft. The commando accepts, empties the front of the plane of its passengers, they being brought towards the rear of the aircraft. The organization of the conference should not only save time to prepare the offensive and check that the doors of the plane are not booby-trapped with explosives, but also increase the fatigue of the commando.
At 5:12 p.m., the GIGN commander gave the signal for the assault.
Three motorized bridges approach the aircraft, two towards the rear doors with 11 men on each side, and one bridge of 8 men at the front of the aircraft. They opened the right front door of the aircraft with difficulty, because the gangway was too high and blocked the door opening. She moved back then advanced again, once the door was opened, injuring a GIGN man. The members of the terrorist commando, who had taken refuge in the cockpit, fired through the partition.
The first gendarme to enter the plane was Éric Arlecchini, known as “Arlé” (wounded by bullets during the assault, he died accidentally on duty two years later with another gendarme) who placed himself in front of the plane. back of the device to cover the rest of the group. He is followed by Thierry Prungnaud who approaches the cockpit and manages, under the effect of surprise, to kill two terrorists and wound a third, before receiving heavy fire.
The exchange of fire continues between the men of the GIGN and the last hostage-taker, hidden under the navigation tablet of the aircraft. He throws a grenade which lands 80 cm from Thierry Prungnaud, still on the ground, and who has the reflex to turn his back on the object to protect himself from the explosion, which generates a 20 cm hole in the floor of the plane. Thierry Prungnaud received shrapnel in his lower back and legs and lost consciousness for a few seconds.
At 5:18 p.m., all passengers and cabin crew were evacuated through the rear doors of the aircraft via emergency slides. Despite the violence of the shooting, fewer than thirty people were injured. With ambulance sirens as background music, Commander Favier sends a terse radio message to the control tower: “Operation complete, losses limited”.
At 5:29 p.m., twenty minutes after the start of the assault, the last terrorist was shot in the heart. More than 1,000 rounds of ammunition were fired during the assault.
30 years later, the gendarmerie is learning the lessons of this assault.
[…] If the Marignane assault is rightly considered a success, it also marks a turning point for the unit. The lessons learned are numerous and omnidirectional, whether in terms of equipment (weapons, vehicles, ballistic protection), employment doctrine (negotiation strategy, media management, assault approach) or training (integration into the air ecosystem). “ Firstly, with the arrival of continuous news channels and, more broadly, real-time communication, we have been thinking about how to work better with the media, that is to say on the way to integrate the fact that the adversary is aware of our system, or even our intentions, in our operating methods. Based on this postulate, this had consequences on our negotiation strategy, on that of employment decisions, as well as on the assault itself. », explains Major General Ghislain Réty, who first arrived at the Group in 1995 and is currently at its head. The second line of operation is technical education. In this respect, the year 1995 marked a real turning point. In Marignane, we see an operational officer going up armed with a revolver, which seems completely outdated to us today. »
From there, the GIGN is in fact reviewing all of its equipment, from ballistic protection in the broad sense, with the arrival of shields and consideration of bulletproof vests, to weaponry, including mobility vectors. . More powerful weapons are thus appearing within the group, with calibers allowing them to shoot from farther away, to more easily pierce materials such as airplane windshields, and to have less deviation in relation to the wind. . To compensate for the lack of protection provided by the gateways used in Marignane, the GIGN is also working on vehicles almost dedicated to attacking aircraft, but which could also be used to carry out an assault on the second or third floor of a building. . […]
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