Disguised police seize hijacker

Press, 9 March 1984, Page 6

Disguised police seize hijacker

NZPA-AP Geneva/r An Algerian student who said that he had a bag of explosives, hijacked an Air France jetliner with 68 people aboard to Geneva. Swiss police disguised as airport staff, overpowered him nearly five hours later. All the passengers and crew were safely freed.

Official Geneva sources identified the hijacker as Ali Chohra, aged 27, an engineering student in Darmstadt, West Germany. They said that he had demanded that the plane be refuelled and flown to Libya.

The Air France Boeing 737 was en route to Paris

from Frankfurt on Wednesday with 62 passengers and a crew of six when it was forced to land at Geneva’s Cointrin Airport. A police spokesman, Marcel Voudroz, said that the passengers and crew had been freed when policemen in airport work clothes entered the plane to deliver lunch and took Chohra by surprise. Shortly afterwards, the passengers continued on to Paris. Mr Voudroz said that Chohra had been alone, although he had pretended to have a partner on board. He also appeared to have been armed only with a pocketknife with a 12cm blade,

although he had said that he had explosives in a handbag. A spokesman for the West German Ministry of the Interior in Bonn said that the knife was “something that would not ordinarily be confiscated at airport security controls.” Chohra had demanded to speak to Libyan authorities in Geneva. They had told him that Tripoli would refuse the plane permission to land, “because of Libya’s firm and principled stand against terrorism,” the official Libyan news agency reported. A West German spokesman, who declined to be identified, said that a

policeman serving food in the cockpit had hit Chohra in the face with a tray and overpowered him. “I became a little frightened then, although everyone kept calm, because we feared he might have explosives,” said Jean-Ives Chauviere, a French passenger. Passengers variously described Chogra as “civilised,” wearing sunglasses, with short dark hair and with a mixture of Arab and European features. They said that he spoke German and French with a slight accent, but did not say why he wanted to fly to Libya.