Air Mauritania Hijacker Thrown a French Curve

A quick-thinking pilot fooled a gunman who had hijacked a jetliner flying from Africa to the Canary Islands Thursday evening by braking hard upon landing then quickly accelerating to unbalance the man so that passengers could down him.

The Air Mauritania 737 carrying 71 passengers and a crew of eight was taken over by a gunman sporting two pistols shortly after it took off from Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, for Gran Canaria, one of Spain's Canary Islands. It had a planned stopover in Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania.
The hijacker ordered the pilot to fly to France, but the crew convinced him there was not enough fuel onboard. Morocco denied the crew a landing in the city of Djala in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, so the pilot headed for Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, the original destination.

Speaking to the hijacker enroute, the pilot realized the man did not speak French. The Captain then used the public address system to warn the passengers in French of the strategy he was going to employ - a heavy landing with a maximum autobrake setting followed by max power and a pitchup. The concept worked, the hijacker was thrown off balance, he dropped one pistol and passengers and crew-members overpowered him. 20 people were slightly injured in the landing evolution and the melee that followed.

The plane landed safely in the Canary Islands and no one was hurt. A senior Spanish government source said the man had been trying to commandeer the Boeing 737 to fly to Paris. He was arrested by the Guardia Civile after the jet landed at Gando Airport.

Jose Segura, the central government's chief representative in the Canaries, told Ser, a Spanish radio station that the hijacking came on the same day that Spain began the trial of 29 people, mostly Moroccans, for the 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people, and days after al Qaeda called for attacks on Mauritania's rulers. Passengers had understandably assumed throughout that the hijacker was an Al Qaeda terrorist and that they were in a potentially lethal situation..