Wadie Haddad (Arabic: وديع حداد; 1927 – 28 March 1978), also known by the kunya Abu Hani (أبو هاني), was a Palestinian militant, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
He organized several hijackings of international civilian passenger aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s,[1] the most infamous of which was the Entebbe hijacking, when Palestinian and German militants under his command held 106 hostages – primarily Israeli Jews, although four non-Israeli Jews were also held captive[2][3] – on a flight from Israel to France after diverting it to Entebbe, Uganda.
He received a degree in medicine from the American University of Beirut,[5] where he met fellow Palestinian refugee George Habash, who was also a medical student.
After the 1967 Six-Day War, the Palestinian wing of the ANM transformed into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist formation, under the leadership of Habash.
The Dawson's Field hijackings of 1970, when PFLP members including Leila Khaled brought three passenger jets to Jordan, helped provoke the bloody fighting of Black September.
Haddad became ill and was admitted to an Iraqi government hospital, where the doctors could not figure out what his condition was and suspected he had been poisoned.
According to intelligence provided by an Israeli agent in East Germany, Haddad's screams of pain were heard throughout the hospital and he had to be heavily dosed with tranquilizers and sedatives.
[11] The letter and two other highly classified documents from the CPSU Central Committee archive were located and secretly copied by Vladimir Bukovsky in 1992.