The plot hinged on a lover’s trust and a calculator. On April 17, 1986, Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian man, escorted his pregnant Irish girlfriend, Ann-Marie Murphy, to London’s Heathrow Airport for an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. He had hidden 3 pounds of plastic explosive and a detonator in the bottom of her suitcase, set to activate at altitude by a pressure-trigger concealed in a calculator. He told her the bag was too heavy to check together and that she should proceed alone. Security personnel, acting on a tip from Israeli intelligence, found the device during a routine x-ray screening. Murphy was unaware she was carrying a bomb. Hindawi was arrested at a nearby hotel.
The Old Bailey trial revealed Hindawi was acting on orders from Syrian intelligence officials, who promised him money and military training. The goal was to destroy the Israeli airliner, killing all 375 people on board, during a period of heightened tension between Israel and Syria. The British government, enraged by state sponsorship of terrorism on its soil, severed diplomatic relations with Syria. The 45-year sentence from Mr. Justice Mars-Jones was unprecedented in its length for a British court, intended as a severe deterrent and a political statement.
The event is often remembered as a foiled terror attack. Its deeper peculiarity lies in its cold, personal brutality. Hindawi used his intimate relationship as the delivery mechanism, showing a calculated willingness to sacrifice his girlfriend and their unborn child. The method turned a human connection into the ultimate vulnerability, a tactic that foreshadowed later exploitation of personal trust by terrorists.
The lasting impact was legal and diplomatic. The sentence set a new benchmark for severity in terrorism cases in the UK. More significantly, the direct link to Syrian state officials led to a rare and total diplomatic rupture between Britain and another nation, illustrating how a single, failed plot executed by a manipulated individual could fracture international relations. The case established that a state could be held accountable, not just its proxies, for terrorism conducted on foreign soil.