Captain Michel Bacos, the pilot of the Air France flight that was hijacked to Entebbe in 1976 who refused to leave behind his captive Israeli passengers, passed away at 95 on Tuesday.
On Sunday, June 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139 departed from Tel Aviv carrying mainly Jewish and Israeli passengers.
The plane flew to Athens, where it picked up additional passengers and then departed for Paris at 12:30 p.m.
Moments later it was hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - External Operations, and two German nationals, who demanded that Israel and other countries release imprisoned terrorists.
The hijackers diverted the flight to Benghazi, Libya, where one passenger, who was thought to have suffered a miscarriage, was freed, and then continued to Entebbe, where they were held in an old terminal.
Out of the total 248 passengers, more than 140 passengers who had non-Israeli passports were released. Bacos and his 12-member crew were given the same option, but Bacos refused, saying he would not leave without all passengers being freed.
He and his team would go on to stay with the remaining hostages, about 80 of whom were Israeli, expecting the worse.
Bacos was initially denied any interaction with the captive Israelis, but he did not relent and was ultimately allowed to join them. He would ultimately become the intermediary between the hostages and the hijackers.
Less than a week later, on July 4, Israeli commandos freed hostages in a daring raid that took the hijackers and the Ugandan authorities off guard.
Three hostages – Jean-Jacques Maimoni, Pasco Cohen, and Ida Borochovitch – were killed in the rescue, as was Yoni Netanyahu, the leader of the IDF's elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit and brother to future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A fourth hostage, Dora Bloch, who had been taken to a hospital in Kampala before the rescue mission, was later dragged from her hospital bed and murdered by officers of the Ugandan army.
Bacos later recalled in an interview how he had asked one of the hijackers why he was targeting a French airliner, to which he was told, "Because France sold arms to Israel."
Bacos said he dismissed this accusation. "This is rubbish, your claim was true 10 years ago [in 1960s], but now only the U.S. sells arms to Israel," he told the hijacker.
Bacos refused to take more than two weeks off after being freed, and upon returning to the cockpit he insisted that his first flight would be to Israel. He remained in close contact with the survivors and with the Netanyahu family in the following decades.
Bacos was awarded the Legion of Honour, France's highest civilian decoration, in appreciation of his heroic actions. He was also given a special award from the Israeli government.
