Gun ‘planted’ in jetliner

Press, 3 January 1985, Page 6

Gun ‘planted’ in jetliner

NZPA-Reuter St Croix, Virgin Islands

St Croix prison officials believe a convicted mass murderer managed to hijack an American Airlines DC-10 to Cuba on Tuesday because an ally had planted a gun aboard the plane for him.

The officials said Ishmial Laßeet, a Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart who is known as Ishmial Ali, aged 37, was a “desperado” who could not be held in the Virgin Islands. Edwin Potter, the Virgin Islands director of corrections, said Laßeet was not manacled because federal laws prohibited it. Laßeet emerged from the toilet of the American Airlines plane with a revolver and ordered the aircraft carrying 197 passengers and crew to Havana.

The plane returned to New York later but Laßeet was still in Cuba. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is in charge of the probe into the hijacking.

Richard Shraeder, warden at the Golden Grove Prison on St Croix, said he had no idea how Laßeet’s gun had got into the toilet and suggested there was a “conspiracy,” that someone else on board the plane planted it for him.

Laßeet was one bf five Virgin Islands men convicted for the murder in

1972 of eight people, including several tourists from the United States mainland, at the Fountain Valley golf club, during a robbery. He was being returned to a Federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, after winning SUSI2,OOO in a civil suit on St Croix for violation of his civil rights in prison there in 1979. He. was serving eight consecutive life terms.

The three guards were from the St Croix Bureau of Corrections, said Mr Shraeder.

Officials said that according to the Federal Aviation Administration it was against the law to handcuff anyone on board an aircraft.

Laßeet was searched before being put in the plane. Mr Shraeder said Laßeet went to the toilet which was too small for a guard to accompany him, and emerged doubled over, as if in pain. When he stood upright he put his revolver into the guard’s ribs and told him not to move.

“He just went into the bathroom and came out with a gun planted there (in the restroom). He got the drop on one officer,” said Mr Potter. Laßeet was described as having a cool, smiling manner, and Shraeder said, “Behind the smile and the easy talk, there’s an undercurrent of violence.”