Reports this evening that a hijacking has been stopped at Domodedovo airport in Moscow. Yesterday afternoon.
Apparently, a passenger on a Moscow-bound flight from Mineralnye Vody “made demands” of the crew and held up the plane for two hours. One report says this passenger turned to the plane’s captain saying he had “valuable information for the security forces.” The pilot reported the incident to air traffic control who diverted the plane to a special lot. In the meantime, the demander changed his demand: now he wanted to see the security administrators as well as representatives of the media. A fellow passenger felt ill. Instead of medics, though, the airport’s security and FSB boarded the plane and cleared it out.
It is unclear right now who this guy is or how one guy can hold up a plane or why he did this and how an offer of information constitutes a demand or how good of a hijacker he was if the pilot was able to, you know, land the plane exactly where he wanted, or whether this is anything more than the froth of a drunken rant, but Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that a body presumed to have fallen out of the plane [sic] and that police have cordoned off some of the landing/take-off strips and are not letting passengers off their planes on this, the hottest day of the year in Moscow. The planes are stuffy, out of water and even juice.
In short: who knows. More knowledge when I know it.
How disturbing! I was flying from Domodedovo yesterday, never heard about the attempted hijacking tho. I wonder how did this guy manage to threaten the pilot.