http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?newsl...9B242&set_id=1
Pilots attacked during Air Algeria flight
January 20 2003 at 12:35PM
Algiers - Three young men - all unarmed - attacked the crew in the cockpit during an Air Algeria flight headed for the capital, the official APS news agency and airport officials reported on Monday.
The Sunday night flight that originated in Paris landed without incident, said the agency.
The men, all about 25 years of age, entered the cockpit and demanded to speak to a top Algerian official, said an airport official, speaking on condition he not be further identified.
The three boarded the plane, carrying 161 passengers, on a stopover in the eastern Algerian city of Constantine, said APS.
That hijacking came at the height of a bloody Islamic insurgency
They then went into the cockpit. One shut the door while the other two attacked the pilot and co-pilot, according to the airport official.
The attackers were overcome by other crew members, and turned over to police, said the official.
Further information was not immediately available, including who the men demanded to meet. It was not immediately clear whether the three were members of one of the Islamic insurgency movements active in Algeria for the past decade.
It was the first known incident on an Air Algeria flight since a spectacular hijacking on Christmas Eve 1994 when a team from the radical Armed Islamic Group took over an aircraft full of passengers and demanded to fly to Paris.
Three passengers were killed during the three-day drama that ended in Marseille where a French rapid-action team stormed the plane and killed the hijackers.
That hijacking came at the height of a bloody Islamic insurgency triggered when the army cancelled the January 1992 legislative elections that a now-banned Muslim fundamentalist party was poised to win.
The insurgency continues 10 years later.
The violence has killed an estimated 120 000 people. - Sapa-AP