⛩️ #37 A Sea of Blood: Osama Bin Laden & Japan

The Massacre of Four Honeymooning Japanese Couples

Nov 10, 2024

The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Luxor, Egypt. Image: Ian Lloyd

All the Japanese around me were shot…there was a sea of blood I never want to recall.

Swiss survivor of the Luxor massacre

* * *

Congratulations!

Your name is Sachiko Yokō.

You’re 50 years old.

You live in Joetsu City on the Sea of Japan.

It’s 1997.

You’re working as a dorm mother at the company housing provided by your employer.

Your daughter, Tomomi (26), lives in the dorms too.

She’s your only child. She’s your only family — you’re a single mother.

You work your tail off to provide for her.

And it is a pleasure.

And now Tomomi, your only daughter, is getting married.

His name is Eiichi Kishida.

He’s a good man. 30. A “salaryman”, an office worker. Not destined for the executive ranks, but a good, solid provider and a squad leader of the Itakura Town Volunteer Fire Brigade.

They’ve been dating 4 or 5 years, Tomomi and Eiichi. They like to go on drives together. Friends teased them, wondering when they were going to take the plunge and make it official.

You were more than wondering — you were hoping, wishing, sending up pleas to every deity available.

And then they tell you: we’re getting married. You smile, and cry and, inside, you’re punching the air like someone who suddenly remembered how to tie an obi belt.

Congratulations!

Eiichi takes Tomomi into town, to the Japan Travel Bureau. He’s splashing out for the honeymoon — going abroad!

All the way from Joetsu City — of Uesugi Kenshin, samurai war hero turned genius reforming administrator — to Luxor, home of the temple of Hatshepsut, one of the most powerful female pharaohs in history, whose reign was marked by peace, economic prosperity, and brilliant architecture.

Wait, wasn’t there a plane hijacked there in the 70s? There was, Luxor airport, and 28 Japanese people were on the aircraft. And they were all released unharmed.

That was more than 20 years ago. And the kids are on an official tour — everything arranged, bus, guides, hotel — so there’s nothing to worry about.

Tomomi and Eiichi have a church wedding ceremony on 8th November 1997. They pose in an open-top car afterwards.

It was wonderful.

Congratulations!

Then off they fly to Egypt. And now you’re just waiting for them to return and start their new life together.

* * *

It’s Monday, 17th November.

Tomomi and Eiichi will be back Wednesday.

As usual, you mom the workers in the dorm.

Grown men and women you have to feed, water, clean for, support, advise, scold, raise like they’re children of your own.

But Tomomi is your actual daughter — and maybe, soon, she and Eiichi will bless you with grandchildren, so the love and care you currently give to strangers can be invested in your own flesh and blood.

Dinner: rice, fish, miso soup.

A final circuit of the building before bed — picking up some trash left carelessly in the hallway.

In your tiny room now, laying out the futon.

The telephone clangs suddenly to life. Another of your charges needing help, no doubt. Maybe another fool in his thirties standing in his underpants asking how to open a tin of pineapple.

You answer the phone.

A voice is falling all over itself on the other end.

Announcing it is from JTB. Japan Travel Bureau.

Amongst a blizzard of other words, you understand:

“There's a possibility they’ve been caught up in a terrorist attack.”

You have no idea what to do with your hands, your face, your soul.

Eiichi’s parents call next. They got the exact same JTB voice, the exact same message.

Then two and a half hours of agony, sitting ramrod straight in a chair, before the JTB voice arrives again:

“Eiichi was injured, but it doesn’t appear to be life-threatening.”

Nothing on Tomomi, nothing on your daughter. But this is good — Eiichi may be hurt but he’s safe now.

Then the JTB voice stops calling.

This is the longest night of your life.

Eiichi’s uncle, Minoru Saijo, has rushed over to the Kishida house to take charge, and says the truest thing of all: “It’s going to be chaos over there. I don't know how much we can trust what JTB tell us.”

The next morning:

Tuesday 18th November

It’s over.

Confirmed: Tomomi and Eiichi, dead.

10 days post-wedding.

60 other tourists, dead. Including three more newly-married Japanese couples on the same JTB tour.

Machine-gunned then hacked to pieces with machetes — oh God, please tell me they were dead before the mutilation — at the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Luxor, Egypt.

* * *

Your community is tight-knit.

One of the admin chiefs at town hall — Imai-san— was childhood friends with Eiichi’s father, plus in business with your brother. As soon as he hears the news he runs down to town hall, to the records section, to look up the marriage registration.

He can’t find it. Turns out Eiichi and Tomomi had left the paperwork until after the honeymoon.

They were never officially married.

“Congratulations” turns to ashes in your mouth.

* * *

The “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman. Image: United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui Criminal Indictment No. 01-455-A, Prosecution Trial Exhibits

Egypt. Mid-1970s.

Militant Islamic student groups named Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah are formed, both following the guidance of “The Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Abdel-Rahman, who memorized a Braille version of the Qur'an by age 11, is one of the most outspoken Muslim clerics to demand Egypt become a pure Islamic republic.

Islamic Jihad kills President Sadat in 1981, but the popular revolution they expect never breaks out. Instead, the plotters are rounded up.

Abdel-Rahman spends three years in Egyptian jails awaiting trial on charges of issuing a fatwa calling for the president’s assassination.

He’s fed the usual Egyptian prison diet (beatings, electric shocks), but is acquitted — then expelled from the country. He makes his way to Afghanistan and contacts his former professor, Abdullah Azzam, now co-founder of an Islamic charitable organization called Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK) — along with some guy named Osama bin Laden.

Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman builds a strong rapport with bin Laden during the Soviet–Afghan War and, following Azzam's murder in 1989, takes over control of the international jihadist arm of MAK.

In July 1990, Abdel-Rahman travels to New York City to take over control of MAK’s international arm. If you know what happened vis-a-vis the Soviets in Afghanistan you can guess what happened next — he hooks up with CIA, who have built an Islamist network while supporting the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Despite his name being listed on a State Department terrorist watch list, CIA helps get him a green card. Then, after returning from an overseas trip, there’s a bureaucratic bun-fight which ends with the green card disappearing — and him requesting political asylum instead.

You might think the Blind Sheik would have been grateful for CIA’s behind the scenes help to get him into the country — but you’d be wrong.

Instead, he travels widely across North America, denouncing the west: issuing a fatwa that declared it lawful to rob banks and kill Jews in the U.S., condemning Americans as the “descendants of apes and pigs”, plus calling on Muslims in the West to “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land”, which if nothing else is a taking clear position.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, there was a spate of terrorist attacks in which over 1,100 people were either injured or killed — encouraged by Abdel-Rahman, who was recording his Brooklyn sermons on cassette tapes and sending them to Cairo for duplication and distribution to tens of thousands of followers.

The Egyptians knew exactly what was going on: the head of the state information service telling The New York Times in the early 1990s, “Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman uses New York as a base. He raises funds and sends money back to Egypt with couriers. He passes on messages to his followers, giving orders about what they should do next and who they should target. We do not understand why the U.S. authorities have allowed him to enter the country.”

But the good will Adbel-Rahman had earned by helping kill Soviets in Afghanistan didn’t last much longer — because his core group of devoted followers who attended his New York sermons in 1993 bombed the World Trade Center, in an attack that killed 6 but failed to bring down the Twin Towers as designed.

* * *

Although he wasn’t directly implicated in the World Trade Center bombing, afterwards FBI began to investigate Abdel-Rahman. A professional snitch named Emad Salem — who the Feds previously used to go after Russian gangsters selling weapons and green cards — infiltrated the mosque and tried to get people to talk about terrorism on the wire he wore.

(There are gigantic ethical questions about this kind of investigation, but you already knew that).

Salem finally managed to get Abdel-Rahman on tape stating acts of violence against U.S. civilian targets were not taboo — plus vague details about an apparent follow-up plot to the World Trade Center bombing: a simultaneous 5-bomb attack to destroy the United Nations HQ, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and a Lower Manhattan federal building housing the FBI.

Abdel-Rahman was finally grabbed up on 24 June 1993, along with nine of his followers. He was charged with seditious conspiracy, solicitation to attack a U.S. military installation, and conspiracy to conduct bombings.

While the Blind Sheik waited for his trial to begin, back in Egypt the two groups who took their inspiration from his smuggled cassette tapes, al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, launched an assassination attempt on President Mubarak. Mubarak escaped unharmed and retaliated with a massive and ruthless crackdown on their members and their families.

And, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bomb, CIA was now much more interested in helping defeat the Islamists — many of whom had already fled Egypt for lives in exile.

One notable member was the former official spokesman of al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah, a fellow by the name of Tal'at Fu'ad Qasim, who had somehow managed to obtained asylum in Denmark, despite his public espousal and embrace of terrorist violence against civilians.

Now CIA was watching him in Denmark — and when, in September 1995 he travelled to war-torn Bosnia, where veteran Islamists were trying to recreate a European version of Afghanistan, they took their chance.

Qasim was kidnapped from the Croatian border, questioned aboard a U.S. Navy vessel, then handed over to Egyptian authorities in international waters — who are then presumed to have tortured then executed him.

6 years before the 9/11 attacks, it was the first recorded use of “extraordinary rendition”.

In 1996, the Blind Sheik was convicted of 48 of the 50 charges against him and sentenced to life in solitary confinement without parole.

In Egypt, the Islamist movement had become paralyzed. 20,000 fighters were in jail and thousands more had been killed by the security forces. Then, in July 1997, a deal was brokered between the al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah and the Egyptian government, where the movement formally renounced violence.

The agreement divided members between those in Egypt who supported it and those in exile who wanted the attacks to continue. Leading the opposition was Islamic Jihad leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — remember this name — who termed it “surrender”.

al-Zawahiri enlisted another exile in Afghanistan with him named Ahmed Refai Taha to sabotage the initiative with a massive terrorist attack.

The plan: a band of six terrorists dressed in police uniforms, armed with machine guns and machetes. Where: the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, a popular tourist destination.

* * *

We were about twenty people on the bus and our tour guide said, “So now we are leaving the east side, which means the city of the living people and we are going to the west side, which means the city of the dead people”.

Luxor survivor Franziska Mueller

By 8.10am four buses, one of Japanese tourists, one British, and two Swiss tour groups had converged at the temple. There were around 400 tourists and Egyptians in and around the site.

At the entrance they passed the temple’s single armed guard.

I remember seeing a very beautiful Japanese girl. She was sitting on a bench dressed all in white, very dainty. I imagined that she was on honeymoon.

Swiss survivor Beatrice Nigg

No-one noticed the arrival of a blue taxi at 8.35.

Six young men got out, wearing military-style uniforms, red headbands and carrying holdalls.

At the gate the men were asked for their tickets.

The last man reached into his holdall, took out an automatic weapon and executed the armed guard, then two temple staff.

Then more and more shots started echoing through the valley. Then screams.

Four Swiss holidaymakers, Felix and Franziska Mueller, Beatrice Nigg and an unnamed friend, scrambled over a wall and hid in a niche on the outside of the temple.

First we heard all the screaming. Then, we realised that they would kill us if we were not quiet.

Franziska Mueller

There was a deathly silence between us. No one dared breathe.

Beatrice Nigg

The shooting then in a way started to taper off, I would say, after fifteen to twenty minutes.

Felix Mueller

After the last shot, there was still screaming, and of course, now we knew that they also had knives and of course, we didn’t hear the knives, we could only hear the screams.

Franziska Mueller

I knew that I would probably never be able to deal with what I would see so of course, we were prepared to see the worst. And what we saw was the worst.
Yes.
It was all these people you saw when they were alive. They were lying dead.

Franziska Mueller

And then I saw the Japanese girl again, still sitting in the same spot but just dead.

Beatrice Nigg

The killing went on until the floors of the temple streamed with blood. Altogether 71 people were killed, including four Japanese couples on their honeymoons, plus three generations of the same British family, the youngest only 5 years old.

The attackers hijacked a bus and escaped towards the Valley of the Kings, where they were cornered by police and either killed themselves or shot down in cold blood.

* * *

The attack stunned Egyptian society, devastated the tourist industry, and consequently sapped most popular support for violent Islamism in Egypt.

The revulsion of Egyptians and rejection of jihadi terrorism was so complete the attack's supporters backpedaled. Mastermind Refai Taha claimed the attackers intended only to take the tourists hostage, despite the evidence of the systematic nature of the slaughter.

Others denied Islamist involvement completely. From his cell in chilly southern Minnesota, Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman blamed the Israelis for the killings, and Islamic Jihad leader al-Zawahiri maintained it was all a false flag operation by Egyptian police.

* * *

While in Joetsu City a nervous JTB voice was calling Japanese parents to tell them their kids had been caught up in a terrorist outrage, the White House issued a statement from President Clinton:

Earlier today, I called President Mubarak of Egypt to offer our nation's condolences to the families of those killed in the terrorist assault at Luxor this morning. Once again, we are reminded of a painful truth: Terrorism is a global threat. No nation is immune. That is why all nations must redouble our commitment to fight this scourge together.

Although the six attackers had died on the scene, CIA was eager to help roll up the organizing network — but most of it, including ultimate organizer al-Zawahiri, were beyond reach in safe haven Afghanistan.

However, after their work a couple of years earlier tracking down Tal'at Fu'ad Qasim to Croatia — so he could be rendered back to Egypt — CIA did what they could, tracing the Luxor plot back to another small nation on the edge of Europe where our story comes to an end: Albania.

Albania

Post-Communist Albania had officially embraced Islam, allowing Islamic charities to build mosques in return for establishing much-needed hospitals and schools.

In March 1997, a wildly popular financial pyramid scheme collapsed, bringing down the government and forcing much of the population into bankruptcy.

It was in this ramshackle country that Islamists had built up a European power base — after failing to do the same in Bosnia.

After Luxor, CIA sent their people into the streets of Tirana to find the al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah members involved in the attack — and got them. A dozen were rounded up and handed back to Cairo, where the “Returnees from Albania” case became one of the biggest criminal trials in Egyptian history.

But the Islamist leaders in safe-haven Afghanistan — including Islamic Jihad leader al-Zawahiri, plus Osama bin Laden, who had himself made a secret visit to Albania— and they vowed revenge:

On August 5th 1998, a month after the Albanian renditions, an Arabic-language newspaper in London published a letter from al-Zawahiri, warning that America’s “message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being prepared”.

Two days later, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing 224 people.

The war between the Islamists — later called al Qaeda — and America had begun.

Postscript

Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and ultimate mastermind of the Luxor attack, became one of the main orchestrators of 9/11, as well as Osama bin Laden’s successor as head of Al-Qaeda. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan on July 31, 2022.

In June 2013, Egypt's then-president Mohammed Morsi appointed Adel el-Khayat, a member of al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah’s political arm, the Building and Development Party, as governor of Luxor. el-Khayat resigned within a week of his appointment due to public unrest related to the group's commission of the 1997 massacre.
The “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman died at Federal Medical Center, Butner, North Carolina on February 18th 2017, from complications of the diabetes that blinded him as a child. His body was returned to Egypt for a funeral attended by thousands of mourners.
Tal'at Fu'ad Qasim — the leader of al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah who was granted asylum in Denmark and kidnapped in Croatia by the U.S. — was removed from the U.S. sanctions list in 2017, twenty-two years after he was secretly executed by Egypt.
On May 11th 2022, the U.S. Department of State issued Public Notice 11744, rescinding al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah’s designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
As of this edition, JTB is offering week-long tours of Egypt, including two days in Luxor, starting at ¥790,000 per person