Hijack alert after drunk claims bomb on Turkish flight

A drunken passenger on a Turkish Airlines flight caused a hijack alert on Wednesday when he passed a note to the plane’s pilot indicating that he had a bomb in his possession, an airline official has said.

The chief executive of the airline, Temel Kotil, said to a television reporter that they had discovered the passenger making the threat was drunk.

Passengers on the flight, on route to St Petersburg in Russia from the Turkish resort town of Antalya, disarmed the man who made the threat, according to a spokeswoman for Turkish TV channel TAV.

He was not found to be carrying a weapon or to be in possession of a bomb.

The plane was carrying 164 passengers, most of whom were Russian tourists, and 7 crew members. It landed at the St Petersburg airport safely, Turkish media reported.

Turkish Airline’s chief executive told the Anatolian news agency that the passenger had passed a note to the pilot, saying that he wanted to be allowed into the flight cabin or he would detonate the bomb he was carrying.

The flight’s captain refused to open the door to the flight cabin, and the man was overpowered by other passengers on the flight, Kotil added.

Hijackings are not uncommon in Turkey, where in the last two years there have been a number of incidents ending without casualties.

Late in 2007, two men hijacked a plane on route to Istanbul from northern Cyprus, but after they forced the plane to land in southern Turkey they released their hostages and surrendered.

www.thy.com