Parliament finds no evidence of PLO deal

The site of the Swissair crash in February 1970 Keystone

A parliamentary control committee has found there is no case to answer concerning allegations of a secret Swiss deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1970.

A journalist had claimed in a book that a former Swiss foreign minister had struck a pact with PLO representatives that assured Swiss diplomatic support in exchange for immunity from terrorist attacks. A Swissair flight was the victim of a bomb attack in February 1970, killing 47 passengers as it crashed just after take-off in Zurich.

Seven months later, another Swissair flight, bound for New York, was hijacked by a Palestinian commando and flown to Jordan to force the handing over of jailed Palestinian militants in Switzerland.

The Swiss attorney-general and the government had both drawn blanks in separate investigations into the allegations.

On Thursday, the parliamentary investigative group also came up empty handed. “We strongly suspect that there was no such agreement,” said its chairman Alfred Heer.

However, it was noted that no investigation was able to question suspects of the bomb attack who remain at large. They were also unable to determine the identities of anonymous sources mentioned in the journalist’s book.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung journalist who wrote the book, Marcel Gyr, has criticised investigations for not going far enough in examining the evidence.