Birth: NULL/NULL/1953 Death:NULL/NULL/NULL
Born in 1953 to a Christian Palestinian refugee family originally from Haifa; was raised in a refugee camp in Beirut; began studying English Literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut but interrupted her studies in the third year after Israeli commandos led by Ehud Barak, disguised as a woman, killed Palestinian leaders Kamal Nasir, Kamal Adwan and Yousef Najjar, an event that influenced her to the extent that she attended a PFLP military training camp in Baghdad and adopted the nom de guerre Thurayyah Al-Ansari; in an operation masterminded by Wadie Haddad, hijacked on 13 Oct. 1977 together with three comrades (Zuheir Akasha, Nabil Harbi and Nadia Duaibes) a Lufthansa airliner en route from Mallorca to Germany; after an erratic route – with several countries refusing to give permission to land – the plane was stormed four days later in Mogadishu, Somalia, by German special forces; survived as only hijacker but was wounded and sentenced to 20 years of prison; was released after two years by Somalian authorities for her poor health situation and went underground (mainly in Beirut and Damascus using her maiden name); lived with her husband Professor Ahmad Abu Matar and daughter in Norway from 1991; was detected and arrested in 1994 and extradited to Germany in 1995; was tried in 1996 and sentenced to 12 years in prison for murder, attempted murder, abduction in conjunction with taking hostages, and encroachment of air traffic resulting in casualties; in 1997, Germany accepted that she spends the rest of her prison sentence in Norway, where she was released early in Nov. 1999 due to her deteriorating health; lives since in Oslo with her husband and daughter.
