On June 27, 1976, Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann, members of the West German Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen or RZ, hence RC), together with comrades from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an Air France plane with 248 passengers on board and forced the pilots at gunpoint to land the plane at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda. There the terrorists were warmly greeted by Uganda's president, Idi Amin. The hijackers separated the Israelis and Jews from the larger group of hostages. In the next two days, using passports as identifiers, they released 148 non-Israeli and non-Jewish passengers, keeping more than 100 Israelis, some non-Israeli Jews, and the non-Jewish pilot as hostages. For the government of Israel, the question of whether the hijackers were motivated by anti-Semitism or “merely” by anti-Zionism was irrelevant. As its citizens were now hostage only because they were citizens of the Jewish state, it had a responsibility to do all it could to free them. The RC and PFLP demanded the release of 53 terrorists held in prisons in France, Israel, Switzerland, Kenya, and West Germany and threatened to kill the remaining Israeli hostages unless their demands were met. The prisoners whom the PFLP/RC team sought to have released included six members of the Red Army Faction in West German, Swiss, and French prisons as well as the surviving member of the Japanese Red Army squad that had perpetrated the Lod airport massacre in Tel Aviv in 1972. That same day the office of the PFLP in Aden, Yemen, issued a communiqué claiming that it had captured the French aircraft “to declare to the world that the French state is a historical enemy of our Arab nation” and to denounce French assistance to Israel. The PFLP's goals were “the complete liberation of the Palestinian soil, the expulsion of the Zionists and the setting up of a democratic, secular, socialist state in Palestine.” “Nazism,” the statement asserted, “whether in Germany or in Israel will not be forgiven by history for the crimes it committed against Arab strugglers and their comrades.” It advocated that “rifles be raised in the face of the imperialist Zionist enemy, the enemy of mankind, civilization and progress” in order to “free the world of the chains and handcuffs imposed on it by capitalism, imperialism, reaction and Zionism.”