A hijacked Ethiopian Airlines flight was forced to overshoot its destination and circle Geneva, Switzerland, where it was eventually able to land, reports said on Monday.
An aviation news blog, AirlineReporter.com, was among the first to report on the hijacking, saying that the Boeing 767-300 was “flying over Sudan at around 5pm Pacific Time when it started squawking 7500”, a code indicating that a hijacking was in progress.
The report quoted an electrical expert as saying that the alert could not have been a glitch.
It circled above Geneva with a military escort for a time, with its fuel running out, while waiting for a response to a request for asylum.
It was unclear how many passengers it was carrying, but the Boeing model can typically carry up to 350 people.
Around three hours and 45 minutes after the hijack alert, Pacific Time, the aircraft had only 20 minutes of fuel left as it flew in Swiss airspace, and there were reports that one of its engines might be flaming out.
Some moments later, the flight was cleared to land, with a “hostage negotiator” heard speaking to the crew by radio, AirlineReporter.com said.
Geneva airport police said the situation was "under control" and that the hijacker had been "held". There were no reported injuries and the airport was temporarily closed, the police said.
Geneva is nearly 700 kilometres northwest of Rome, the aircraft’s original destination, if drawn on a straight line. The flight from Addis Ababa was supposed to take six hours and 10 minutes.
Once it landed, according to one aviation reporter, the pilots could be heard saying they would exit through the flight deck windows. A two-and-a-half-minute clip of the pilots’ communications circulating on Twitter seemed to corroborate this, with one pilot being heard to say, “I’ll be coming out via the window.”
AirlineReporter said there was no confirmation on whether the passengers and crew would be given asylum.
The unfolding events were reported largely on Twitter by aviation journalists and on specialised blogs.
Ethiopian Airlines reportedly released a statement, which it hastily took down, assuring that the passengers and crew were safe, and that it was making arrangements to bring its fliers to their intended destinations.
The last hijacking of an Ethiopian flight, the report said, was in 1996, when the aircraft lost fuel and had to land in the sea.