I don’t know of anything earlier than the Black September movement that covers both Carlos the Jackal and Abu Daud (Munich Olympics hostage taking.) Possibly because the middle east was basically a shooting war zone between the 40s and 60s.
I suppose, too, we have to distinguish between kidnapped hostages and public hostage incidents. Kidnapping and hiding hostages has gone on for centuries, I’m sure. Giving formal hostages as a guarantee of behaviour has been a common technique since ancient times. The public incident - most famously, the Palestinian triple aircraft hijacking or the Munich Olympics - rely on mass media. Live TV across the world only became common in the mid-60’s. Before that, any such action would simply be a suicide mission with no value. The local authorities, in a more authoritarian time, would simply cut off access by the media, and the rest of the world would not know until the incident was over, and if hostages died during the attempted rescue, they would be “killed in a terrorist attack”. These incidents were more dependent on the exposure - once the live hostages were visible on live TV, the authorities would not be able to comingle rescue deaths with the initial attack.
Remember that John Wilkes Booth’s initial plan was to kidnap Lincoln, but Lee surrender as well as the simple logistics of puling off such a stunt in horse & buggy days made that unworkable.
Ironic that the boom in anti-capitalist insurgency kidnapping were made possible by the postwar economic boom, with affordable cars. The Black Hand were so poor that when they assassinated Franz Ferdinand all they had were POS revolvers, homemade bombs, and a bag full of live frogs that hey scattered to distract the bodyguards’ horses.
In December, 1996, the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peruwas taken over by 14 members of the Tupac Amaru movement. They held it until April 1997 when Peruvian security forces raided the compound killing all of the terrorists, 1 hostage, and two of their own commandos.
Yes, I’m looking for the earliest examples, the trailblazers.
I know that Delta Force was formed in large part to rescue hostages and that was in the late 70s. The SAS was ready for hostage rescue in 1980 when they stormed the Iranian embassy. From what I’ve read, those types of units spend a lot of time working on plan hijacking scenarios which was popular in the 70s. Plane hijackings seem to be a real problem for them.
As md2000 says, hostage-taking-as-publicity-stunt must have started around the time of mass media. I can’t think of any examples before the FLQ in 1970 though.
During the Jewish uprising against the British Mandate in Palestine, the Irgun took six British servicemen hostage in 1946, and a banker and a judge in 1947. The prisoners were eventually released unharmed. Later in 1947 two British hostages were hanged by the Irgun in retaliation for the hanging of Irgun prisoners.