Mass killer hijacks airliner to Cuba

Press, 2 January 1985, Page 6

Mass killer hijacks airliner to Cuba

NZPA-AP Miami A man convicted of killing eight people in a racially inspired mass murder overpowered his guards aboard an American Airlines DCIO jetliner with 198 people aboard yesterday and hijacked the plane to Cuba. The prisoner, Ishmael Ali Labeet, was being taking from St Croix, in the United States Virgin Islands, to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City aboard the flight. Labeet, aged 37. seized a gun in a struggle with his guards and commandeered the plane about an hour before it was scheduled to land. The aircraft had landed safely in Havana and Labeet was taken into custody by Cuban authorities, said a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, Fred Farrar, in Washington. None of the 185 passengers or 13 crew members aboard the plane had been injured, Mr Farrar said. Late last evening the Cu-

ban authorities reported that the plane had taken off for New York after being refuelled. Labeet, also known as Ishmail Muslim Ali, was one of five blacks convicted for the killings in 1972 of eight people at the fashionable Fountain Valley golf course in St Croix. The killing of the eight, seven of them white, were linked to an anti-white mood that then prevailed on the resort island. Labeet was sentencced to eight consecutive life terms in prison. On August 13, 1973, he was taken to the nearby United States Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. He was transferred to prisons on the United States mainland because of inadequate security in the island’s facilities. Labeet was back in the Virgin Islands for proceedings in a civil suit, in which he was awarded SUSI2,OOO ($24,720) in damages by a United States District Court jury in St Croix. He had claimed that his civil rights

had been violated when he was placed in solitary confinement for 90 days in 1979. He was being taken by three guards to the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York City, to be transferred to the Federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Labeet “managed to overpower or somehow disarm one or more guards,” and seize a gun, Mr Farrar said. Eleven United States domestic flights were hijacked to Cuba in 1983. but a six-month lull was broken on March 27. 1984, when a man demanding SUSS> million and claiming to be a soldier of the Black Liberation Army commandeered a Piedmont Aviation flight with 58 aboard to Havana. The next day, a man threatening to ignite a bottle of liquid forced a Delta Air Lines flight to Cuba. The New OrleansDallas flight carried 26 people.