On 24 December 1994, four members of the Armed Islamic Group boarded Air France flight 8969 at Algiers, an Airbus A300 bound for Paris, disguised as airport security officers. They took the aircraft with 220 passengers and 12 crew aboard. Over the next two days they killed three passengers. The siege ended at Marseille with an assault by the French GIGN, broadcast live.
What they intended
The hijackers demanded the aircraft be flown to Paris and asked for a fuel load far in excess of what the flight required — enough that French authorities concluded the aim was not a landing but to use the fully fuelled aircraft as a weapon against Paris, possibly the Eiffel Tower.
This assessment, in 1994, is the reason the incident is studied. Seven years before September 2001, a European government was operating on the assumption that a hijacked airliner might be intended as a guided incendiary device rather than as a bargaining tool.
Algiers, and getting the aircraft moved
Algerian authorities initially refused to let the aircraft depart, surrounding it on the ground. The hijackers executed passengers to force the issue — an Algerian police officer, a Vietnamese diplomat, and a French embassy cook.
France pressed for the aircraft to be released, on the reasoning that a hostage situation is more resolvable where the responding force controls the ground. Algeria eventually allowed it to leave, and it flew to Marseille, where French negotiators kept it on the ground by arranging a refuelling that never quite happened.
The assault
On 26 December, with the hijackers becoming agitated and demanding immediate departure, the GIGN went in. Operators approached using mobile stairs and entered through the doors while others fired from the ground.
The fighting inside the aircraft lasted about twenty minutes — far longer than Mogadishu, and in a confined cabin full of hostages. All four hijackers were killed. Nine GIGN operators and several passengers and crew were wounded. No hostages were killed during the assault.
French television carried it live, and the images of the assault entering an airliner in daylight are among the most widely seen of any counter-terrorist operation.
What it established
Operationally, AF8969 confirmed the doctrine from Mogadishu and added to it, particularly on approaching a large widebody where the cabin is long and hijackers can be dispersed. It also demonstrated the value of negotiators buying time to keep an aircraft on the ground rather than airborne.
Strategically, it is the case that is always cited when the question is asked of what was known before 2001 about aircraft used as weapons. The answer is that the possibility had been assessed in a real operation, acted on by a national government, and then not generalised into international aviation security policy.