A two-storey, shabby concrete box – the reception building. Next to it a tower and some corrugated iron hangars. Two runways, behind them sand dunes and then the waves of the Indian Ocean. The name of the airport is painted in red on the white reception building: MOGADISCHU; behind it: WELCOME.

Mogadishu airport in Somalia was the scene of one of the most spectacular hostage rescues in history. On October 18, 1977, 30 men from the GSG 9 special unit of the Federal Border Police stormed the Lufthansa plane “Landshut”.
The hostages, 82 passengers and only four crew members, were freed from the hands of four Palestinian terrorists after more than 105 hours.

Theo Sommer wrote in “Die Zeit” at the time about the successful hostage rescue: “The flawless commando operation in Somalia finally gave the nation a boost after weeks of frustration. … When the Deutschlandlied was sung [on the return of the hostages ], tears welled up in many eyes – tears of gratitude, not of martial pride. A new sense of unity spread across the country.”

“Mogadishu” is the reconstruction of an odyssey of initially 87 innocent people on board the hijacked plane, which leads from its take-off in Mallorca via Rome and Cyprus to Bahrain, Dubai, Aden and finally to the dramatic
liberation in Mogadishu. The fate of the courageous captain Jürgen Schumann, who sacrifices himself for the passengers and his crew, the stewardess Gabriele Dillmann, who will later be admiringly called the “Angel of Mogadishu” because of her selfless commitment to thehostages, and the co-pilot Jürgen Vietor, who is solely responsible for the “Landshut” after the murder of Captain Schumann, are unforgettable. Among the hijacked passengers, the
physical and, above all, psychological tension in this absolutely exceptional situation leads to harrowing scenes: a husband who robs his wife of the last of her water, or a mother who is to be shot in front of her son
.

At the same time, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in Bonn is fully responsible for the lives of the hostages; he has decided not to give in to the terrorists’ demands. He has only one chance left: the storming of the plane by the elite GSG 9 unit. It is a race against time. From airport to airport, the men track the hijacked plane until finally, at the last minute, they accomplish their masterpiece with professional
precision under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ulrich Wegener.

For the first time, the events surrounding the abduction and liberation are revisited in fictional form and put in a new light: Until now, the hijacking has mainly been seen in the context of political terrorism in Germany
. In fact, the vacation plane was hijacked by a purely Arab terrorist group. Added to this is the new discovery that the leader of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) organization, Wadi Haddad, who
was responsible for the hijacking, was an agent of the KGB.