Anis Naccache (4 June 1951-22 February 2021) was a PFLP member from Lebanon and one of the perpetrators of the OPEC siege. Naccache was also involved with an assassination attempt on former Prime Minister of Iran Shapour Bakhtiar in 1980, for which he was arrested.
Biography[]
Anis Naccache was born in Beirut, Lebanon on 4 June 1951 to a Muslim family. Naccache joined Wadie Haddad's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and he took on the fighting name of "Khalid". Naccache was one of the top PFLP members, so Haddad chose him to work with his protege Carlos the Jackal in the 1975 OPEC siege, in which the PFLP would help Iraq in keeping Saudi Arabia and Iran out of its war with Iraqi Kurdistan by killing their delegates to OPEC and weakening their oil industry. The siege occurred in December 1975 in Vienna, Austria, and Naccache, Carlos, and Revolutionary Cells members separated the delegates into Neutral, "Friendly", and "Enemy" groups, with Saudi delegate Ahmed Zaki Yamani and Iranian delegate Jamshid Amouzegar being the only two in the "enemy" group. The hostage-takers succeeded in taking the hostages into a bus with curtains that in turn took them to an Austrian plane flown by Muammar Gaddafi's personal pilot. However, Carlos' murder of Libyan OPEC delegate Yusuf al-Azmarly led to relations with Libya souring, and the pilot was forced to land in Algiers, Algeria instead. The hijackers released the non-Arab hostages to appease the Algerians so that they could leave the airport, and they landed in Tripoli after insisting on arrival; Gaddafi, however, ordered the authorities to ignore the terrorists. The Austrian ambassador successfully negotiated the hijackers' return to Algiers rather than let the hijackers rot on the runway, and the hijackers were forced to release the hostages for $20,000,000. Naccache was angry at Carlos for ruining the operation, and he was arrested by Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Algerian police after attempting to shoot the released Iranian and Saudi hostages after they were handed over to the Algerians. In 1982, he was sentenced to life in prison for attempting to kill the old prime minister of Iran, Shapour Bakhtiar, in Paris, and he was released and extradited after a series of bombings in 1990. Afterwards, he became a geopolitical consultant for a television channel in Lebanon. He died of COVID-19 in Damascus, Syria on 22 February 2021.