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On September 5, 1977, an RAF "commando unit" assaulted Hanns-Martin Schleyer, then president of the German employers' association, in Cologne. His driver and bodyguard were immediately killed, and Schleyer was held prisoner in a rented apartment in a rather anonymous residential neighborhood near Cologne. He was forced to appeal to the moderately-leftist German government of Helmut Schmidt that the first "generation" of RAF members, then imprisoned, would be exchanged for him. Police investigations to find out where Schleyer was being hidden failed.
When it became clear that the government was unwilling to repeat a prisoner exchange after their experiences two years earlier following the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz , the RAF tried to exert additional pressure by hijacking the airplane "Landshut" with the help of the allied Palestinian terrorist group PFLP. After a long odyssey through the Arabian Peninsula and the murder of Captain Jürgen Schumann the terrorists and their hostages landed in the Somalian capital MogadishuMogadishu ( Somali: Muqdisho is the nominal capital city of Somalia, eastern Africa, on the Indian Ocean. In 2000, the population was estimated to be 1,219,000. Mogadishu is the country's largest city, a seaport, and a commercial and financial center..
After political negotiations with the Somali leader Siad BarreMohamed Siad Barre ( Somali: Maxamed Siyaad Bare ( 1919/ 1921? January 2, 1995) was the self-proclaimed socialist president of Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Prior to his presidency he was an army commander under the parliamentary government Somalia had inher the German government was allowed to assault the plane. This happened on October 18October 18 is the 291st day of the year (292nd in Leap years). There are 74 days remaining. Events 1009 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a Christian church in Jerusalem, is completely destroyed by the "mad" Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who hacke through the special task force GSG-9, which had been formed after the 1972 Munich Olympics' hostage crisisNote: This article currently refers to the perpetrators of the Munich Massacre as "terrorist". There is currently a debate regarding whether this term should be asserted on Wikipedia. Its use on this page does not indicate a general acceptance of the term. All hostages were freed without injuries, out of the four terrorists only one survived.
As a reaction Hanns-Martin Schleyer, brought to Belgium through the Netherlands, was shot by his kidnappers. At the same time founding RAF members Andreas BaaderAndreas Baader ( May 6, 1944 October 18, 1977) was the first leader of the German terrorist organization Red Army Faction, commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang''. A high school dropout, he was one of the few members of the German terror movement who, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all imprisoned in Stuttgart-Stammheim, committed suicide. Irmgard Möller, who was imprisoned with them, survived with four knife wounds in her chest. She later claimed that the suicides were actually extrajudicial killings. Though all official inquiries on the matter suggest that this was not the case, the rumor still persists in radical leftwing circles.
One consequence of the German Autumn was that the German government stated that it would never again negotiate with terrorists.