Colombian Hijacking Ends After Crew Helps Seize Gunman

The hijacking of an airliner in Colombia’s guerrilla haven ended peacefully Tuesday after a member of the plane’s cockpit crew helped overpower a gunman who had held 30 hostages.

Gen. Hector Fabio Velasco, head of Colombia’s air force, refused to name the hijacking suspect but described him as a young rebel deserter seeking passage to Europe.

“He was accessible,” the general told reporters at an impromptu news conference after all 26 passengers and four crew members were released.

Velasco, having participated in negotiations with the hijacker, added that “from the beginning he showed he was a thinking person.”

The hijacking began late Tuesday afternoon at a dusty airstrip in San Vicente del Caguan, the main port of entry to a Switzerland-size swath of land that the government ceded two years ago to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Witnesses said a man in civilian clothes approached the plane as passengers were boarding, asked where the flight was bound and walked up the ramp. When asked for his boarding pass, the hijacker brandished a pistol.

Video images showed two civilian police officers walking helplessly around the plane as the pilot signaled sharply to air traffic controllers and then took off.

The plane, a turboprop operated by the Satena national airline, landed just before nightfall at the Catam military airstrip next to Bogota’s El Dorado International Airport. The hijacker later released three women, plus a man suffering from peritonitis.

As the plane sat idle on the Bogota runway, Velasco said, a member of the cockpit team and a passenger plotted to disarm the gunman.

“When the hijacker gave them an opportunity, they both jumped on him, they took his gun away and they held him,” the general said.

The five-hour ordeal coincided with a day of high-level government meetings to decide the future of the same demilitarized zone that the hijacker sought to escape.

The guerrilla haven, about 200 miles south of Bogota, the capital, was handed over to the FARC as a gesture of goodwill that helped launch peace talks. But the zone’s demilitarized status will expire today unless President Andres Pastrana grants an extension. Colombia’s on-again, off-again peace process has produced no tangible results and has been dubbed a “dialogue of the deaf” by critics.

Satena is the only airline authorized by the FARC to enter the demilitarized zone and operates three flights a week to and from San Vicente. They often carry journalists, peace activists and government envoys.

Velasco said that he had been in direct contact with the plane’s crew from early on and that the hijacker had asked to speak with representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross and from Amnesty International.

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Special correspondent Mauricio Hoyos at Catam air base contributed to this report.