Earlier today, an Air West passenger plane carrying 103 people was hijacked in Sudan. The hijacker demanded to go to London. Reuters quoted Air West’s commercial manager as stating, “So far there is one hijacker with an AK-47 machine gun.” The Guardian now reports that the man hijacked the plane with a pistol. Most of the passengers were Sudanese; there was one British national and one Italian national. Air West spokesman Saif Omer identified the hijacker as Mohamed Abdu Altif, 26, of North Darfur. The plane, apparently low on fuel, landed in nearby Chad where the gunman surrendered.

Halime Assadya Ali of the Associated Press, writes:

“The hijacker entered the cockpit a half-hour after takeoff and put a pistol to the pilot’s head, demanding to go to London, said Chad’s infrastructure minister, Adoum Younousmi. When the captain told him there was not enough fuel, the hijacker agreed to land in Chad, where he surrendered.”

Air West, which operates out of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, is one of 95 airlines prohibited from landing in European countries because of poor safety records. But that prohibition did not stop a hijacked Ariana Afghan Airlines Boeing 727 from being allowed to land in England back in February 2000 — despite the fact that Ariana had been banned from international flights. That flight, carrying 156 passengers and crew, was hijacked in Kabul, Afghanistan by nine men armed with knives, guns and grenades. The flight was refueled in Kazakhstan and then allowed to land in England where negotiations with the hijackers began. After a four-day standoff — England’s longest airport hostage siege — the hostages were freed and the hijackers surrendered.

The nine Afghan hijackers were convicted in British courts of hijacking, false imprisonment, possessing firearms with intent to cause fear of violence and possessing explosives. They were jailed in England but their conviction was later overturned on the grounds that they acted under duress. British courts would not deport the men back to Afghanistan, ruling instead that the hijackers would be allowed to remain in England indefinitely “to work, possibly claim state benefits and support their families in the UK.”

Also from The Guardian:

“The men said they were fleeing the Taliban regime and had commandeered the Boeing 727 in February 2000 because they had no other choice. After holding 156 passengers and crew hostage in what became Britain’s longest airport siege, they were jailed at the Old Bailey, but freed on appeal in 2003 after it was ruled that the law about whether they had acted under duress had been wrongly applied.”

Prime minister Tony Blair strongly disagreed with the high court’s ruling:

“We can’t have a situation in which people who hijack a plane we are not able to deport back to their country. It is not an abuse of justice for us to order their deportation. It is an abuse of common sense, frankly, to be in a position where we can’t do this.”

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