NYT : Passengers Escape as Hijacking in Turkey Goes Awry

Passengers Escape as Hijacking in Turkey Goes Awry

By SEBNEM ARSU | August 19, 2007

ISTANBUL, Aug. 18 — Two men tried to hijack a Turkish passenger plane with 142 people aboard on Saturday but failed after pilots arranged an emergency landing in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya and the two lost control of the passengers.

Television footage Saturday showed people leaving the plane at the airport in Antalya, Turkey.

The plane was en route to Istanbul from Nicosia, in northern Cyprus, when the hijackers, identified by Turkish officials as Mehmet Resat Ozlu, a Turkish national, and Abdulaziz Maliki, a Syrian holding a Palestinian passport, demanded that it be diverted to Iran. They were protesting actions by the United States administration, the officials said.

The pilots reported being under attack minutes after the Atlas Jet flight, carrying 136 passengers and six crew members, took off.

The two men, shouting in Arabic, ran to the cockpit door and tried unsuccessfully to kick it open. One held a plastic bag and said it contained a bomb, passengers told NTV, the private television network.

“I saw these two men at the airport; they had odd looks,” Erhan Erkul, one of the passengers, told NTV. On the plane, he added, “They said they were Al Qaeda members.”

The pilots convinced the hijackers that the plane needed to refuel and landed in Antalya. Then they kicked open the cockpit windows and fled the plane. The hijackers decided to free the women and children on board, but as people began filing out of the plane through two side doors, passengers forced open a door at the back of the plane and, in a sudden flood, most of the remaining hostages escaped.

State-run television pictures showed people jumping to the ground one after another and running away in panic.

Some civil aviation experts here questioned the actions of both the pilots and passengers, but Ali Ariduru, head of the Turkish civil aviation, said that they took the right course under the circumstances.

After more than five hours of negotiations, the hijackers released the remaining four passengers and two crew members and surrendered.

Allegations that the two men were linked to Al Qaeda or other organizations were under investigation, Osman Gunes, Turkey’s interior minister, said in a news conference afterward.

“We’re going to investigate further as to what kind of objectives they had,” he said.