Red enters, out of the blue

The terrifying threat of hostage crises is something we live with in this age. But four decades ago, an incident unfolded unexpectedly on our shores.

When Tan Sri Zaman Khan’s police colleagues at the Special Action Unit told him on Aug 4, 1975 that the Japanese Red Army had seized hostages at the AIA building on Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, he refused to believe them.

The Japanese Red Army (JRA) siege was the first hostage-taking incident in the young nation, notes Dr Aruna Gopinath, desk officer for South-East Asia at the National Defence University of Malaysia’s Centre for International Defence and Security Studies.

Although Malaysia was in a state of emergency as it battled the Communist Party of Malaya, it was a complete surprise when five gunmen walked into the consular section of the US embassy on the 9th floor at 10:45am and began to gather captives, moving on later to the AIA agency office and the Swedish embassy. 

By afternoon, they had collected 53 victims – including not only Malaysians but also people from America, Sweden, Japan, Australia, Cambodia and Hong Kong.

Japanese Red Army radicals, who had been released from detention in Japan, being marched down to the JAL DC-8 airliner on Aug 8, 1975 for the swap. – The Star

At the start of the four-day ordeal, the captors demanded the release of seven of their comrades who were imprisoned in Tokyo. They released the women and child hostages after two days.

But the last 15 male hostages were taken to Subang international airport and held on a DC-8 for another two days as Malaysians negotiated the route and destination for the hostage-takers and their five members who had been flown in from Tokyo. (The other two refused to travel.)

Irene Leong, a consular assistant, and her colleague Molly Pereira were standing behind an open counter that morning accepting visa applications. Leong, who retired in May last year, remembers that two or three men came in first, dressed in lounge suits, with handkerchiefs over their faces. They were carrying Pan Am bags, which turned out to have guns, bombs and hand grenades in them.

“They couldn’t speak English well,” she says. All they said was: “Hands up!” Pereira thought it was a robbery, Leong remembers, and quickly took her rings off and hid them underneath the counter.

Malaysian commandos arriving at the AIA building on Aug 5, the second day of the 1975 hostage crisis. When the terrorists saw the military personnel, they threatened to blow up the 9th floor. –The Star

The gunmen gathered up Consul Robert Stebbins, Leong, Pereira and Brenda Boudville and took them to a section at the back, which was under renovation. Coming up to investigate, AIA guard Sukdev Singh was shot under the right eye and police patrolman V. Armuthalingam was hit in the jaw.

AIA agency chief KP Choong, who had married Helen less than a month earlier, heard the noise from his office at the carpark level. Thinking that the agency staff were fighting, he and Tan Khia Fatt, the regional vice-president, took the lift up. 

When they reached the 9th floor, they both stepped out and walked towards the agency. There were shots from the US Embassy, at the other end of the floor. Tan dashed to the door leading to the stairwell, and ran downstairs but Choong ducked into the agency.

At about 1pm, a couple of the JRA members came to round up the AIA staff, who were taken to the waiting room where they joined those who had been visiting the Consular section. About 20 minutes later, the terrorists took hostages from the Swedish Embassy, including Charge d’Affaires Fredrik Bergenstrahle (who has since died), and left them with the American consular staff in the back room.

Leong looks at headlines of the 1975 incident. Her daughter Cheryl, who was then just a year old, is in the photo on the right, in a blue dress. – Azman Ghani/The Star

Leong was later awarded the Meritorious Honour Award “for her courage and calm demeanour Aug 4 – 6, 1975, while being held captive… during the terrorist occupation of the Consular section, Kuala Lumpur.”

For staff of both embassies, the mood was grim. They were seated on a concrete floor among bags of cement, bricks and cinder blocks.

“The JRA was in complete control,” says Stebbins, who is now retired, in an email interview. “Talking was not allowed.” Some of the hostages made eye contact with each other, “but each of us was powerless and with our own thoughts. I am sure that a number of hostages, as I did, prayed silently.”

Each of the five terrorists had two 9mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistols, Stebbins remembers. “They usually had one in their gloved hand, and another carried in the belt. They were threatening throughout the period, occasionally pointing their pistols. One of them, while guarding us, liked to play with a hand grenade.”

Leong, whose daughter Irene was just over a year old then, remembers that they had no food or access to the toilet for the first 12 hours and were forced to use a bucket.

In the waiting room, Choong tried to enlist a fellow hostage for a counter-attack. He had noted how short the JRA members were and that (after the first 12 hours), the captives were allowed to go to the toilet, escorted. Choong, who had started a taekwondo club at AIA, thought of overpowering them. He asked another male hostage to say he also needed to go to the toilet at the same time: “He said, ‘You are mad!’ and walked away from me.”

While Choong was plotting, a crisis management team had been set up in what was then called First National City Bank.

Zaman was called back by his former unit to help during the AIA hostage crisis. Almost 700 police were deployed. – Brian Moh/The Star

Reality bites

Zaman’s last day as deputy commander of operations at the UTK had been the day before and he dropped in at Bukit Aman to say goodbye before taking up his promotion to Selangor’s Criminal Investigation Department chief.

When his colleagues told him he had to come back, “I didn’t believe them and said I had to go to Selangor. Commanding officer ACP M. Shanmugam said it was no joke but I still didn’t believe it. The Inspector General of Police, Tun Hanif Omar, had to tell me to stay back!”

He rushed to the AIA building to help secure the ground floor and, as more men came, secure the others, floor by floor. Tun Hanif and the other senior officers arrived and, after the JRA dropped a note with their demands, negotiations began.

The hostage-takers had placed booby traps at the door to the 9th floor , set a 3pm deadline to blow up the floor and Zaman says they threatened, via phone, to kill the US Consul and Swedish Charge d’Affaires.

The embassy staff in the back room could not hear or see what was going on, but those in the waiting room could hear what was going on because the door to that room was open, says Choong.

He remembers that the JRA were angry with Communications Minister Tan Sri V. Manickavasagam, who was negotiating with them until Home Affairs Minister Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie returned from Jakarta that night and took over. “They threatened to blow up the building and slammed the phone down, several times,” he says. “We could see and hear everything. We thought we were goners. But when Ghazali took over, the JRA members’ tone and demeanour changed.”

At one time, their chief negotiator, the only one who could speak English, said: “We can still see military personnel outside! We will blow up the building!” the agency chief recalls. One of them shot Federal Reserve Unit Constable Ku Ahmad Ku Razak, who was in the car park, in the left thigh.

“They had the trigger ready,” says Choong. “Ghazali told all of the military to get out of sight. Our hopes and lives were in direct proportion to the feelings of the Japanese.”

Looking back, defence expert Aruna says, the incident “was milder than the form of terrorism today and the demands were much lower. It was mainly to free their comrades.”

Choong puts it more bluntly. “If the same thing had happened now,” he says: “we would have been dead.”

NEXT PAGE: The Challenge Of A Lifetime

Choong, who was a newly-wed during the 1975 Japanese Red Army siege, talks openly for the first time about his ordeal

THE CHALLENGE OF A LIFETIME 

It's been 40 years since five members of the Japanese Red Army, armed with guns, bombs and hand grenades, took over the ninth floor of the AIA Building on Jalan Ampang and captured 53 people.

But the crisis in early August 1975 is still a vivid memory for both the hostages and those who worked to rescue them. Some of them claim it was the biggest challenge in their lives. It changed them and how they handled other situations later.

For Tan Sri Zaman Khan, it happened the day after his last day as deputy commander of operations at the Special Action Unit (UTK), and he was called back to assist on site. It was the “first real case” for the unit formed in 1974 and trained to combat urban terrorism, and their biggest challenge.

“It gave us experience and added urgency to have better surveillance on foreigners and suspected militants,” says Zaman, who later became the founder president of Kelab Sahabat Penjara (the Prisons Friendship Club). “After that incident, we became more alert and had better exchange of intelligence.”

At the scene, Zaman “learned a lot about managing a crisis – the need for a lot of consultation, and how to allocate duties and create a conducive situation. You must not create alarm among the hostage-takers”.

He learned how to talk to the terrorists as he observed master negotiator, then Home Minister (the late) Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie: “We shouldn’t bluff, cheat or give them a false sense of hope.”

The experience helped him as he planned security for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 1989. And it also helped during the 1986 hostage situation at Pudu Prison, when a skin specialist and laboratory technologist were held by six remand prisoners.

“Our 12-man team of UTK commandos stormed the clinic and rescued them with no shots fired,” he recalls. But, he stresses, “It was a different scenario, with criminals on death row. They did not have a mission. They just wanted to get free.”

Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, arriving at the scene of the Japanese Red Army siege on Aug 5, 1975. The hostages did not know he was in the AIA building. –The Star

KP Choong, who headed the agency at AIA back then, says he made a pact afterwards with regional vice-president Tan Khia Fatt and other hostages from the life insurance company. “We were afraid of reprisals after the siege was over,” he explains. “We agreed among ourselves not to say too much.”

He is now a businessman who also does training and facilitation with franchise programmes, but every Aug 4, he calls fellow captive Philip Yap to reminisce. He can still remember his thoughts at the time. His first reaction was, “Why me? I was the one who volunteered to go up to investigate what was happening! Suddenly I wanted to talk to God.”

On the second day, “I thought about what I hadn’t done yet or the things I should have done”. By the third day, he thought, “If I have to go, make it quick. I don’t want to die a lingering death. I resolved to be a better person if I survived. But that lasted only 24 hours!”

In an email interview, American Consul Robert Stebbins, who has since retired, says, “Until Aug 4, 1975, I thought that nine weeks at the US Marine Corps boot camp was the most difficult challenge that I had ever faced. But, being held hostage in a situation over which you have absolutely no control over the outcome strikes at your innermost being.”

Early on, he says: “I realised that as the only American officer held hostage I would probably be the first to be executed if the terrorists decided to make an example or press their demands”. Subsequent events, including his being the last hostage exchanged on the tarmac at the airport on August 7, confirmed that suspicion.

Since then, Stebbins has learned to take life one day at a time and to give thanks for whatever blessings he has received. “I remember Aug 4 every year,” he says. “Better yet, I remember Aug 7 – the day that the remaining hostages and I were released!”

¦ The Japanese Red Army or Nihon Sekigun (JRA) was a communist militant group founded by Fusako Shigenobu (once labelled as "the most feared female terrorist in the world") early in 1971 in Lebanon. The stated goals were to overthrow the Japanese government and the monarchy, as well as to start a world revolution. During the 1970s and 1980s, JRA carried out a series of attacks in Japan and around the world, which included a hostage siege in Malaysia in 1975. In April 2001, Shigenobu issued a statement from detention declaring the Japanese Red Army had disbanded.