-
ROME - A Turkish Airlines plane with 113 passengers and crew on board was hijacked Tuesday during a flight from Albania to Istanbul by two Turks protesting the pope`s planned visit to Turkey, officials said.
The plane was seized by two hijackers who had a message for Pope Benedict XVI, who is due to visit mainly Muslim Turkey in late November, Italian civil aviation authorities told the ANSA news agency.
Asked if the hijackers wanted to protest the pope`s planned visit next month, the airline`s chief executive Candan Karlitekin told Turkey`s NTV television: "The cockpit was told that it was a protest of this nature."
"There is no threat at the moment to the passengers nor the crew. We believe the hijackers will surrender," Karlitekin added.
He said there were 107 passengers and six crew on board the plane which was intercepted by two Italian military F-16s and forced to land in the southeastern city of Brindisi.
The hijackers were unarmed and willing to release the passengers, the deputy director of Italy`s civil aviation authority, Salvatore Sciacchitano, told Italian news channel Sky TV 24.
"They are not aggressive and are willing to free the passengers," he said.
"We managed to speak to the pilot over the telephone who said the hijackers were unarmed and treated the passengers well," Turkish Airlines spokesman, Ali Genc, told NTV television.
The Vatican was monitoring the developments after the hijackers demanded to transmit a message to the pope, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said, quoted by ANSA.
Benedict XVI, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, is scheduled to visit mainly Turkey in November despite a furore over the pope`s recent remarks on Islam.
Doubts had been raised over the November 28-30 visit following outrage in Turkey and the rest of the Muslim World over the speech the pope made last month in Germany linking violence and Islam.
Quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor on the Prophet Mohammed, founder of the Muslim faith, the pope said: "He said, I quote, `Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached`."
The pope has repeatedly apologised for unleashing the storm of protest.
But despite the pope`s statement of regrets, his trip to Turkey, a strictly secular country vying for European Union membership, is unlikely to be an easy one.
Benedict is already seen in Turkey as the anti-Turkish pope for opposing Ankara`s drive to join the European Union as "a grave error... against the tide of history" when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
10/03/2006 17:03 GMT
