awaiting instructions. The commandos took off from Cologne-Bonn Airport on a Boeing 707 on Monday morning (17 October) en route to Djibouti, within a short flying time of Somalia, while Schmidt negotiated with the Somalis. While the team was flying over Ethiopia, an agreement was reached and permission given to land at Mogadishu. The aircraft landed at 20:00 local time with all its lights out to avoid detection by the hijackers. After four hours, unloading all of their equipment and undertaking the necessary reconnaissance, Wegener and Blatte finalised the assault plan, scheduled to begin at 02:00 local time. They decided to approach from the rear of the aircraft, its blind spot, in six teams using black-painted aluminium ladders to gain access to the aircraft through the escape hatches on the bottom of the fuselage and via the overwing doors. In the meantime, a fictitious progress report on the journey being taken by the released prisoners was being fed to Mahmud by German representatives in the airport tower. Just after 02:00, Mahmud was told that the plane carrying the prisoners had just departed from Cairo after refuelling and he was asked to provide the conditions of the prisoner/hostage exchange over the radio. As a small force, the GSG-9 relied on their Somali counterparts to maintain ground defence around the aircraft as well as deception operations. Several minutes before the rescue, Somali soldiers lit a fire in front of the jet as a diversionary tactic, prompting Akache and two of the other three hijackers to rush to the cockpit to observe what was going on, isolating them from the hostages in the cabin. At 02:07 local time, the GSG 9 commandos silently climbed up their ladders and opened the emergency doors. Wegener, at the head of one group, opened the forward door, and two other groups, led by Sergeant-Major Dieter Fox and Sergeant Joachim Huemmer, stormed the aircraft using ladders to climb up onto the wings and open both overwing emergency doors at the same time. Shouting in German for the passengers and crew to get on the floor, the commandos shot all four terrorists, killing Wabil Harb and Hind Alameh and wounding Zohair Akache and Suhaila Sayeh. Akache died of his injuries hours later. One GSG 9 commando was wounded by return fire from the terrorists. Three passengers and a flight attendant were slightly wounded in the crossfire. An American passenger