Some passengers were slightly injured while they were forcing open the rear door of the hijacked plane to escape, said Kemal Tasyaran, one of passengers in the plane of the AtlasJet hijacked as it was heading for Istanbul from northern Cyprus and landed at the Antalya Airport in the Turkish city of Antalya on Saturday.
In a telephone interview with the semi-official Anatolia News Agency, Tasyaran said "two people attempted to storm into the cockpit some 20 to 25 minutes after the plane took off from the Ercan Airport in Nicosia in northern Cyprus. They claimed that they were carrying a bomb. They shouted at passengers that Turkey left them alone."
"Later, some passengers managed to force to open the rear door to escape. Some of them were slightly injured. The injured passengers were rushed to the health center at the airport," he added.
Sources were quoted by Anatolia as reporting that the passengers would be sent to Istanbul by another plane later in the day.
The plane, carrying 136 passengers and 6 crew members to Istanbul from the northern Cyprus, was hijacked by two hijackers earlier on Saturday. Although the hijackers wanted to fly the plane to Iranian capital city of Tehran, pilots managed to land the plane at the Antalya Airport for refuelling.
Earlier report said that one of the hijackers was speaking Arabic and had a knife and the other was carrying a package which he claimed to be a bomb.
Later, an escaped passenger told local television channel NTV that the two hijackers had claimed they were from al-Qaida.
Source: Xinhua
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