Hijacked Brooklyn Jewish Teacher Files $75,000 Damage Suit Against Swissair

A Brooklyn Jewish teacher, who was a passenger on the Swissair plane hijacked by Arab commandos on Sept. 6. filed suit here yesterday for $75,000 in damages against the Swiss airline. The suit by Mona Friedman, 23, in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, was believed to be the first stemming from the four airline hijackings by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Miss Friedman, a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yeshiva University, was a hostage for a day at the Dawson desert airstrip in northern Jordan where the Swissair DC-8 jet and two other hijacked planes were landed, and for four days at a hotel in Amman. In her suit, Miss Friedman said she “suffered bodily injury, wounding, mental pain and anguish in expectation of severe injury and death.” (Fifty-four hijacked airline passengers being held hostage by Arab terrorists in Jordan are regarded by their captors as prisoners of war because their governments allegedly side with Israel, it was reported today in London. The changed status of the hostages was announced by a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.)

Miss Friedman filed her suit under terms of a 1966 agreement signed by some 85 airlines with the United States government, which is a party to the Warsaw Convention which exempts an airline from liability if it can prove it was not negligent and limits damages to $8,300 in each case. Miss Friedman, who said she had aggravated a leg injury when she had to leave the jet on an escape chute, will have to prove the extent of that physical damage and she also will have to establish a dollar value on her mental suffering. The total damages cannot exceed the $75,000 demand, which is the limit set in the 1966 agreement worked out in Montreal. That agreement was worked out because the United States indicated it had planned to pull out of the Warsaw convention, which limits an airline’s liability on international flights to $8,300 per case. The airlines agreed to raise the limit to $75,000 on flights covered by tickets where the United States is the starting point, destination or stopover point. For such flights, the airlines agreed to waive a Warsaw Convention provision holding an airline not liable if it could prove non-negligence. The four hijacked planes all were on flights bound for American airports.