Aeroflot flight 6833
The Tbilisi hijacking was an act of air piracy on November 18, 1983. Seven young Georgians tried in vain a line machine of Aeroflot on the Aeroflot flight 6833 from Tbilisi to Leningrad at gunpoint to land in Turkey to force. The kidnappers were sentenced to death and executed.
kidnapping
The seven kidnappers came from the Georgian intelligentsia , were doctors, artists and actors, and wanted to flee the Soviet Union . After the Tupolev Tu-134 A plane took off with 57 passengers and seven crew members on board, two of them knocked down a stewardess , broke into the cockpit , shot two pilots and asked to land in Turkey. The navigational officer shot one kidnapper and injured the other who fled the cockpit. There were several exchanges of fire in the passenger cabin. The Tupolev landed again at Tbilisi Airport. The hijackers threatened to blow up the plane and requested a flight to Turkey.
Georgia's Communist Party boss Eduard Shevardnadze called for ALFA -Spezialeinheit the KGB from Moscow and monitored use at the airport personally. Parents of the kidnappers tried in vain to prevent the party leader from storming the machine. They agreed to go on board themselves and get their children to give up. Shevardnadze refused. The ALFA unit stormed the aircraft in the early morning of November 19 within eight minutes. Two other kidnappers died. Two passengers and a stewardess were also killed. The responsibility for her death is still debated today. It is also controversial who caused the 63 bullet holes in the plane. The surviving kidnappers were arrested.
process
Shevardnadze called them "drug addicts" and "bandits". In prison they neither visits were allowed to receive or write letters. They were in August 1984 in Tbilisi before court found, and with the exception of 19-year-old Tina Petviashvili for convicted death and executed . Her confessor , the Orthodox priest Theodor Tschichladse, was also arrested a few months later. Although he knew nothing of the kidnapping plans, he was also sentenced to death as a "ringleader" and shot .
The relatives of the kidnappers were exposed to strong political pressure for several years. Several lost their jobs in state institutions on the orders of the Communist Party.
criticism
Many Georgians viewed the hijacking as a national tragedy . Appeals were circulating in Tbilisi against the death penalty for the kidnappers. In their eyes, the kidnappers were young, educated people who did not want to come to terms with the injustices of Soviet reality and who dreamed of living in a free country. After the turning point in 1991 , Shevardnadze was accused in newspaper articles of demanding the death penalty in order to consolidate his position in the Communist Party and to prove his loyalty to the headquarters in Moscow.
Artistic reverberation
In 2001 the play "Jeans Generation, belated Requiem" by the author Dawit Turashvili was premiered in the Free Theater (Georgian tavisupali teatri ) in Tbilisi . It focuses on the hijacking of aircraft. The Marjanishvili State Theater had previously refused to put the play on stage under the working title "Airplane Boy". In 2002 the Georgian director Zaza Rusadze finished the documentary “Bandits” (Arte / ORB / credofilm), in which he searches for clues in what is now Georgia .