[clarification needed] The terrorists' commander, Salem Chakore, proceeded to check all passports while Omar Rezaq went to the cockpit to change the aircraft's course.

At the same time, Chakore had the European, Australian, Israeli, and American passengers sit in the front of the aircraft while the rest, including the Greeks and Egyptians were sent to the back.

Chakore came to an Egyptian Security Service agent, Methad Mustafa Kamal (aged 26),[4] who reached into his coat as if to pull out his passport.

Libya was the original destination of the hijackers, but due to a lack of fuel, damage from the shootout and negative publicity, Malta was chosen.

While approaching Malta the aircraft was running dangerously low on fuel, experiencing serious pressurization problems and carrying wounded passengers.

Malta had good relations with the Arab world, and 12 years earlier had successfully resolved a potentially more serious situation when a KLM Flight 861, a Boeing 747-200, landed there under similar circumstances.

Aided by an interpreter, Bonnici refused to refuel the aircraft, or to withdraw Maltese armed forces which had surrounded the plane, until all passengers were released.

By intercom, Rezaq had a flight attendant call forward Patrick Scott Baker (aged 28), an American fisherman-biologist on vacation.

Tony Lyons, an Australian passenger who could see the stairs platform from his window seat later stated that he saw that Rezaq had to raise his gun in order to shoot Baker.

Of the five passengers shot, Artzi, Baker and Pflug survived; Mendelson died in a Maltese hospital a week after the hijacking after being declared brain dead.

Fifty-two passengers – including pregnant women and children – suffocated from the fumes that enveloped the aircraft when the soldiers placed a bomb underneath the fuselage to break into the hold.

According to Dr Abela Medici, two kilos of highly-explosive Semtex were used, which provided more power than was necessary to allow the commandos safe entry into the airplane.

However, the Times of Malta, quoting sources at the airport, reported that when the hijackers realized they were being attacked, they lobbed hand grenades into the passenger area, killing people and igniting the fire aboard.

Egyptian commandos tracked Rezaq to St Luke's General Hospital and, holding the doctors and medical staff at gunpoint, entered the casualty ward looking for him.

His release caused a diplomatic incident between Malta and the U.S. because Maltese law strictly prohibits trying a person twice, in any jurisdiction, on charges related to the same series of events (similar to but having wider limitations compared to classic double jeopardy).

When Rezaq's airplane landed in Nigeria, Nigerian authorities denied him entry into the country and handed him to FBI agents departing for the United States.

The authorities took a firm stand in denying fuel to the hijackers but made no sensible provisions, through political bias and lack of experience, to meet the circumstances that arose from this decision.

They were determined to get the hijackers at all costs and the Maltese government's initial refusal for U.S. anti-terrorist resources (a team led by a major-general with listening devices and other equipment) offered by the State Department through the U.S. Embassy in Malta – a decision reversed too late – contributed in no small measure to the mismanagement of the entire operation.

[citation needed] Such was the censorship of the media, that the Maltese people first heard of the disaster through radio station RAI TV, when its correspondent Enrico Mentana spoke live on the air via a direct telephone call: "Parlo da Malta.

Here there's just been a massacre ...") Shortly before this broadcast, a news bulletin on the Maltese national television had erroneously stated that all passengers had been released and were safe.

The United States protested to Malta about U.S. personnel sent to resolve the issue having been confined to Air Squadron HQ and the U.S. Embassy in Floriana.

The United States had seen the situation as so serious that it had ordered naval ships, including an aircraft carrier, to move toward Malta for contingency purposes.

The events of the hijacking were related in an account by American survivor Jackie Nink Pflug, who had been shot in the head, on the Biography Channel television program I Survived..., which was broadcast on 13 April 2009.

Laurence Zrinzo, the neurologist and neurosurgeon who established neurosurgery as a subspecialty in the Maltese islands, performed Pflug's neurosurgical procedure.