WORLD : 2 Soviets Fail in Hijack Attempt
A student and a bricklayer who claimed to have explosives tried to hijack a domestic flight to Sweden today, but the jet’s crew apparently didn’t believe them and they were arrested, authorities said.
“There were no bombs, no weapons, nothing,” Mikhail Timofeyev, the deputy minister of civil aviation, said by telephone.
The two tried to hijack an Aeroflot Tupolev-134 with 74 passengers that was en route to the Arctic port of Murmansk from the Latvian capital of Riga, Timofeyev said. The crew decided to land at Petrozavodsk, 150 miles north of Leningrad, the Tass news agency said.
Security officials arrested the two passengers, who were identified only as Kovalenko, 22, a vocational training student, and Kuznetsov, a 27-year-old bricklayer.
Five young Soviet men hijacked five airliners to Sweden and Finland in June and July. They surrendered to police and said they wanted to stay in the Nordic countries. Sweden extradited one of the men to the Soviet Union last week.
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